CHAPTER XXIV
BEARS
Meanwhile, those outside the cave had been witnesses to an unbelievable horror. There was the muttering, rending sound of the avalanche, earth torn from the breast of the mountain, a magnificent spectacle as tons of débris roared earthward, demolishing the cabins at the mountain’s foot. Then, hard upon that first great rush of earth, a second explosion—an explosion that seemed to shake the mountain from towering tip to base, that tore up tortured earth and rock, a roar that drowned all other sounds in its immensity.
Then, silence—breathless, tense.
“The cave!” shrieked Helen. “It is gone! The mouth of it is gone!”
She flung herself into the arms of Edith Lang. The two clung together wordlessly. They watched while cowboys set feverishly to the task of excavation, using whatever tools came to hand. Others dashed back to the ranch for picks and shovels and reinforcements.
Mr. Hammond flung off his coat and joined those working at the pile of earth and rock. Commanding, suggesting, urging, he seemed to be everywhere at once.
Finally Helen roused herself from her numbed silence.
“They will never be able to get to them in time,” she said hopelessly. “Why, it looks as if they would have to dig their way through the whole mountainside. Tom! Ruth! Oh, what shall I do!”
She rose with some wild idea in her head of adding her puny efforts to those of the rescuers.
Edith Lang guessed at her intention and gently pulled the girl down beside her again.
“You would only get in the way, dear. They are doing all they can.”
“But it isn’t enough!” Helen’s hands were clenched. All color had left her face. “They will never get to them in time. Never—never!”
Her desperate cry was duplicated heartbreakingly by those within the cave. Although they knew that those on the outside must have come at once to the rescue, must be feverishly at work, even now, no sound of pick or shovel penetrated to their gloomy prison.
This fact in itself was enough to rob them of all hope. Had their rescue been possible, the voices and shouts of encouragement would be audible now.
They had dug at the imprisoning mass of rock and dirt until fingers were sore and bleeding. Some had found sharp stones and rocks and had continued the frantic digging with these poor implements.
Ruth realized suddenly how futile, how foolish, all their efforts were.
With a little cry of weariness and despair she straightened up and felt about for Tom. Not finding him, she became frightened. It was natural to suppose he had been at her side all this time.
She raised her voice and called his name aloud, at first faintly, then wildly, frantically.
“Tom, where are you? Tom!”
“Coming!”
There was an exultation, a wild gladness in that answering shout that thrilled and startled the prisoners in the cave. They got up from hands and knees, nursed bleeding fingers and peered with an intense, terrible hopefulness in the direction of Tom’s voice.
“Ruth, where are you? Ruth!”
“Here, Tom!” she stretched out her hands to him, clinging to him. “Tom, what is it?”
“I’ve found another entrance to this place! There are tunnels, and at the far end is light—daylight. Do you hear that? Daylight!” His voice was husky and cracked and the shout that went up from a dozen answering throats was wild and hoarse with hope.
“Follow me!” Tom was already turning back toward the tunnel, his arm about Ruth. “You will have to go single file for the passage is narrow. Keep close behind me, Ruth. Hold to my coat.”
Ruth held on to his coat. It is doubtful if anything on earth would have made her let go of it just then!
The whole company straggled after their leader, a weary, battered but hopeful group, yet not daring to hope too much.
Tom led them along the first passage then turned into the second.
There he paused, drew Ruth close to him, and pointed.
“Do you see it—the opening?” he asked.
Ruth, eyes upon that narrow ray of light, drew a sharp breath.
“Yes, I see it, Tom.”
They said no more, for that much was eloquent, and Tom led the way again, going more cautiously now since the farther end of the passage had not yet been explored.
Their progress was slowed considerably by the fact that at this point the tunnel narrowed so sharply that they were forced to rub shoulders with the wall on either side.
At last they were reduced to proceeding crab fashion—going sideways and feeling their way, inch by inch.
Then, when they least expected it, the passage widened suddenly, forming a cave not dissimilar in size, it seemed, from the one they had just left.
Puzzled and wishing to see more of his surroundings, Tom lighted a match. He dropped it with a startled exclamation.
“Stand back, Ruth! Get behind me!”
“What’s the rumpus?” a voice drawled behind them. The boys were crowding into the cave. “Think you see somethin’, mister?”
“Bears!” replied Tom grimly. “Two of them!”
CHAPTER XXV
SUNLIGHT ONCE MORE
Somewhere some one laughed nervously. Another struck a match. Ruth was crowded back into a corner behind Tom’s broad shoulders.
In the flickering light of more matches she stared out from her enforced retirement upon the queerest tableau she had ever seen. Curiously enough, she was not frightened. It all seemed so unreal, fantastic.
Cowboys all around, their weary, white faces lit up oddly by the flickering light, every one with a hand on his holster, quiet, tense, and in the far corner of the place, backed up against the wall, two great, clumsy animals staring at the intruders with eyes half frightened, half fierce!
Even as Ruth stared, fascinated, one of them growled and moved forward a clumsy step. The other, as though encouraged by the defiance of its mate, growled also and ambled forward.
A bear is always more apt to run than fight. But, trapped here in the narrow confines of the cave with a certainty of attack from the rear should they try to escape, the bears took the only course left open to them—battle with their enemies. And a bear, roused to the attack, is a formidable foe!
As the great menacing beasts lunged forward the last feeble match went out, leaving the place in darkness. Only the faint ray of light from the far end of the cave mitigated the intense gloom.
Ruth shrank closer to Tom. The hair began to rise on her tingling scalp. She was frightened now!
She heard the muttered remarks of the cowboys.
“If we all fire we’ll get one of ’em.”
“Leave it to Cameron and me, we’re nearest!” Layton Boardman’s voice was clear and sharp. “Over against the light, Cameron—can you see?”
The bears had halted, probably nonplussed for a moment by the failure of the light that had so clearly shown them their enemies.
One of them, a huge lump of shadow, bulked against the faint light from the opening.
Tom grunted. With a roar, the shadow moved forward.
There was a shot! Another!
“Got him!” was Boardman’s exultant cry.
But the gray shadow against the light, halted with a grunt of surprise as Tom’s first bullet grazed his huge shoulder, now lumbered forward again, moving with incredible swiftness.
Ruth, cowering behind Tom, felt rather than saw the nearness of the brute, knew that it had reared and was towering above them!
Tom’s pistol cracked again and then again.
The sinister shadow reeled, wavered, and fell, raking Tom’s arm in the descent, tearing the skin from shoulder to wrist.
Ruth was vaguely aware that other matches were being struck and in the weird light saw the faces of men bending eagerly above two great beasts, one of which still kicked feebly.
Ruth’s hand, falling on Tom’s arm, came away hot and sticky. She saw then the rent in his coat and the blood dripping from his fingers.
“Tom, you’re hurt! Oh, Tom, your arm!”
“It’s nothing.” Tom’s voice was impatient, curt. “Lucky he didn’t get more of us!”
But Layton Boardman had seen Tom’s injury, as had some of the other boys.
“What you need, Cameron, is something to stop that blood,” the former decided. “Come on, boys, let’s get out of here. The sooner the better!”
All pressed forward.
Tom forced himself to walk steadily, though his arm throbbed badly and he was feeling dizzy.
Ruth put his arm across her shoulders and whispered to him to lean on her.
“You were wonderful, Tom!” she said. “I’m so proud of you!” The words went a long way toward keeping Tom’s head up.
They found the opening of the cave larger than they had expected. It was an easy matter, once they had found their way over the bodies of the dead bears, to crawl out through the aperture into the blessed fresh air.
They stood silent for a moment, all of them, filling their lungs gratefully, faces upturned to the dazzling blue of the sky—a sky, but a short time before, they had thought never to see again!
Boardman looked at Tom, who was keeping his feet only by a tremendous effort of will.
“You must have come to pretty close quarters with that bear,” he remarked gravely.
Tom nodded.
“If I had finished him with the first shot, like you,” he said, “I wouldn’t have been left—this—little—souvenir—” Then he crumpled up, his face a ghastly gray, the blood from his wounded arm reddening the ground where he lay.
Boardman started to lift him, but Ruth motioned him away.
“We have to stop that bleeding first,” she said quietly, but with drawn lips. “He has lost far too much blood already.”
While the men stood about, Ruth tore strips from her skirt, which as “Ann Marks,” the heroine of the play, she fortunately wore, and tied them together. It was the matter of a moment to tear away the tattered sleeve of Tom’s shirt; to twist the strip from the skirt around the arm above the wound and just beneath the shoulder.
Even then, twist with all her might, Ruth could not stop the spurting blood.
“Get me a stick somebody—quick!” she cried. “A little one that I can get through this knot!”
One of the boys was quick to see what she wanted and brought a slender, tough twig and handed it to her.
“Maybe this’ll help, ma’am.”
“Just the thing, thanks,” returned Ruth.
She worked the twig beneath the bandage then began to twist it tighter and tighter until it seemed that the tourniquet must cut into the flesh.
But it worked! The blood flowed more and more sluggishly until finally it stopped altogether. Only then Ruth looked up, flushed and weary, but triumphant.
“Take him to the others as soon as you can, please,” she directed. “He must have a doctor at once.”
When, a few moments later, the disheveled band appeared before their would-be rescuers, bearing Tom among them, those digging at the débris stared for a moment as though they saw a band of ghosts.
But only for a moment. Then such a reunion, such a laughing and shouting and crying hysteria of welcome ensued as that grim old mountain had never witnessed before.
“Now that I’ve got you again, I’m never going to let you go,” Helen cried, clinging to Ruth.
“We must get Tom to the ranch at once—at once, Helen! He may die——”
“Tommy boy!” All the color swept out of Helen’s face.
Tom did not die, though the doctor declared Ruth’s improvised tourniquet had much to do with that result.
“It was quick work and thorough, my dear,” said the old doctor, eying Ruth benevolently over his thick-rimmed glasses. “I congratulate you.”
But Ruth, turning away with the happy tears flooding to her eyes, did not need congratulations. All she cared for was the tremendous fact that Tom would live. Not only that, but he recovered with surprising speed and was out of bed in a day’s time, though, of course, the wound was a much longer time in healing.
As soon as Ruth could bring herself around to thought of her picture again, the cameramen assured her that, so far from the scene being ruined by the second and unplanned landslide, it had been immeasurably strengthened.
“Nothing like the real thing to add realism to a film,” one of them jovially informed her. “I believe the avalanches, artificial and real, will make the greatest picture ever filmed!”
Ruth’s heart leaped at this.
“Some good seems to come even from the worst happenings,” she said. “I’m glad that you had the presence of mind to keep on grinding!”
“We thought the whole thing was staged at first,” they confessed to her. “And when we found out the true state of the case it was too late to stop grinding. The scene was shot.”
“Glory be!” laughed Ruth, and went off to find Tom, Tom swathed in bandages but with the glamour of a wounded hero about him, nevertheless.
A day or two later Chess Copley came to Golden Pass. He had meant to surprise Helen, and his intention was certainly successful.
He came from the railroad station on horseback and when Helen recognized him she flung herself with such fervor at the rider that his mount became frightened and nearly ran away with him.
“That’s the kind of a welcome I like!” cried Chess, as he dismounted and threw the reins to the grinning Andy. “Come here, fiancée, and receive the salute!”
Whereupon he kissed her quite heartily and openly before them all.
“How about business?” Helen asked him eagerly as she led him toward the porch. “You look as though you might be the bearer of good news——”
“The very best,” replied Chess. “Business is great! Nothing now stands between us and eternal bliss. Hello!” as he caught sight of Tom, bandaged but grinning delightedly, “who threw a brick at you, son?”
Of course a recital of the tremendous events of the past few days was quickly poured into his interested ears.
“What did you do with the bears?” Chess queried when they came to the fight in the cave.
“The boys went back the next day and got them,” Tom answered. “I reckon,” with a grin, “they’ll be eating bear meat for a week.”
“Ugh!” said Ruth with a shudder, as she looked at Tom’s arm, “I don’t see how they could touch it!”
A delightful few days followed, during which Ruth added the finishing touches to her picture. There remained the final scene, the close-up of Layton Boardman and Ruth in the humble cabin of Ann Marks, the two lovers reunited and looking toward a rosy future.
It was a short time after the completion of this final scene that Tom found himself alone with Layton Boardman.
Poor Tom did not feel in the best of good humor, for that last scene in which Boardman had held Ruth close and kissed her still rankled in his mind.
“By gosh, I’m glad that last scene is shot,” remarked the actor, with a sigh of relief. “I make a rotten lover, don’t I, Cameron?”
“What? Rotten lover?” queried Tom. “What do you mean, Boardman?”
“Just what I said. I can’t make love for a cent, no matter how I try. You see, it simply isn’t in me. I don’t care for girls that way—never did, no matter how hard they rave over me in the pictures.”
“You—er—did it very well,” stammered Tom. He was so astonished he scarcely knew what to say.
“Thanks for saying that. Then I won’t have to do it all over again!” and Tom felt the note of relief in Boardman’s voice. “I was afraid it might be necessary and that Miss Fielding would call me down for being such a wooden man at it. Ever since I agreed to take the part I tried to drill myself in it. And, believe me, drilling opposite to such a girl as Viola was some job! It went easier with Miss Fielding, but still, as I said before, I’m no lady’s man and never was. I’d never give ’em a second hoot if it wasn’t all a part of the job.” And then Boardman strolled off to join some of the cowboys.
Tom stood stock still for a moment, gazing after the retreating moving picture actor. Then slowly a grin swept over his face.
“Tom Cameron, did you hear that?” he muttered to himself. “Never cared for any girl, never was a lady’s man! ‘Drilled myself in it!’ Gosh, and I thought it was all real! Well, I’ve been seven kinds of a fool—I’ll say so myself!”
Some time later that same evening Tom asked Ruth what she meant to do about him now that she had finished her picture. She succeeded in putting him off once more, though this time without hurting his feelings.
“Wait just a little while, Tommy-boy,” she pleaded. “Just till I see myself on the screen. I must first know what kind of an actress I make.”
It was not very long after this that Ruth found her new picture advertised in electric lights before one of the big moving picture houses in New York.
The first few scenes in which Ruth appeared were sufficient to convince those critics of the moving picture world who had gathered to view “Hearts of the Mountains” that a new and scintillating star had appeared on the horizon.
It is not often that one finds author, director, and star all in the person of one charming girl. Ruth’s career was unique enough to satisfy even the most enthusiastic searchers after romance.
The avalanche was a tremendous spectacle. Those in the theater, gripped and stirred by the power of it, rose as a man and demanded the appearance of the author of the play.
Ruth, who was in the audience, was lifted to the stage by the eager hands of her admirers.
Flushed, tremulous, but wholly in command of herself, she said a few words of appreciation. The last part of her impromptu little speech was fairly drowned beneath the thunderous wave of applause that swept the theater.
Ruth knew that, in that moment, she had won fame.
Sol Bloomberg’s sly attempt to punish Ruth for her acquisition of Boardman and, by stealing Viola, to make a failure of Ruth’s picture had come to worse than nothing.
His picture, starring Viola and her lover, Tony Martano, was a disastrous failure. No one seemed to know just why—except perhaps Bloomberg himself. At any rate, one “listening in” for a moment on a conversation held between him and one of his directors, might possibly have found a clew to the mystery.
“It ain’t that Viola ain’t a good actress, Jim,” the picture magnate asseverated, chewing viciously upon a huge and unlighted cigar. “It’s just that she’s plum silly over that Dago she’s fell for.”
The director nodded in deep dejection.
“Don’t you suppose I know it? She lets Tony Martano hog all her best scenes. And he’s some ham actor! I tell you, Sol,” he went on with a frankness born of long and intimate association, “you sure pulled a bone when you put them two in the same picture.”
Bloomberg flared up at this.
“I wouldn’t ’a’ got Viola at all if I hadn’t held Tony out as bait. You know that as well as I do. Now keep still and get out! I gotta think!”
That his thoughts were not pleasant ones was proved a few moments later when he slammed his hat down on his head and angrily left the office, the mangled cigar, unlit, still between his teeth.
There were more reasons than one for Bloomberg’s deep depression. Not only had he lost money through the failure of his picture, but what shreds of reputation remained to him, as well.
The story of how he had tempted Ruth’s star into breaking her contract had gone the rounds as such bits of scandal will in the moving picture world. Ruth was applauded for her courage and resource, while Bloomberg became a laughing stock even among those he called his friends. Nor were Viola’s chances for making a good contract helped by her desertion of the Fielding Film Corporation at a critical time.
Ruth would not have been human had she failed to gloat a little over the downfall of her enemies.
“So are the wicked punished!” she said, with a twinkle in her eyes, to Helen.
They were back in the living room of the old house at the Red Mill.
At this observation of her chum Helen looked up and laughed affectionately, albeit still with that faint touch of envy.
“You lucky, lucky girl!” she murmured. “With the world at your feet, to say nothing of Tom!”
Ruth Fielding was an orphan and came to live with her miserly uncle. Her adventures and travels make stories that will hold the interest of every reader.
Ruth Fielding is a character that will live in juvenile fiction.
May Hollis Barton is a new writer for girls thoroughly up-to-date in plot and action. Clean tales that all girls will enjoy reading.
This new series of girls’ books is in a new style of story writing. The interest is in knowing the girls and seeing them solve the problems that develop their character. Incidentally, a great deal of historical information is imparted.