Ruth Fielding in Alaska

Helen, being close at Ruth’s side, was the only one to hear the latter’s startled, half-whispered exclamation.

By the time Tom and Chess had noticed the defection of the two girls and had started back toward them, Ruth had recovered her composure.

“What’s the idea of holding up the parade?” Chess demanded jovially.

“Is there anything you want? If so I’ll get it for you,” Tom added.

“Oh, millions of things, Tommy-boy,” Helen cried before Ruth could speak and so betray her agitation. “That really was a very rash promise, but we won’t take you up on it. What we want most right now is rest and privacy and perchance a bite of refreshment. Lead on, lead on!”

Ruth was grateful to her chum for so disguising her own agitation and dismay. Helen’s continuous chatter as they were carried up in the elevator prevented either Tom or Chess from noticing or commenting upon her rather tight-lipped silence.

The elevator stopped and they followed the porter down a rather dark and gloomy corridor richly carpeted so as to muffle the heaviest footfall.

They went first to the girls’ rooms. A key was slipped into a lock and they entered the regulation hotel room, rather stuffy and gloomy, though comfortably furnished, with a bath attached and a door leading off into a smaller room. In the larger of the two rooms the bed wore the disguise of a cretonne-covered couch, thus transforming the bedroom into a rather attractive sitting room during the daytime.

“Here’s your reception room, Ruth,” said Tom, “where you can meet your actors and confab to your heart’s content. Like it?”

“All perfectly lovely, Tom dear, although we really didn’t need the extra room. Still it will be lovely, having the two,” she added quickly, unwilling to spoil Tom’s satisfaction. “It gives one space to move about in.”

“And now,” said Helen, making a face at the boys, “clear out of here, both of you! I know Ruthie wants to rest for a while before she has all that crowd of actors and cameramen and what not coming down on her!”

“I suppose,” said Chess, looking doleful, “that business must spoil our pleasure some time. Why not now!”

Ruth laughed.

“It will be pretty nearly all business with Tom and me from now on,” she said. “But that needn’t prevent you and Helen from having all the good times you like.”

“Maybe not,” sighed Helen. “But Chess’s business will stand horribly in the way of pleasure. I presume for a while I’m doomed to play all by myself. Hustle your old man, will you, Chess?”

“If he’s to be hustled, yes. But his kind are sometimes annoyingly deliberate.”

“Oh, well, go to it, you busy bees, and I will laze gloriously while I look on with pity for all of you. Me for a show this afternoon.”

When the boys had gone to their rooms, only a door or two further down the corridor, Helen asked Ruth if she had really seen Charlie Reid in the hotel lobby.

“I can’t be sure,” Ruth answered, her voice low and troubled. “I just caught a glimpse of a man that looked like him, but as I turned around he dodged into the door of the writing room.”

“That would seem to show that it was really Charlie Reid you saw,” Helen pointed out. “For Charlie would surely be careful about letting you know he was following you just yet.”

“That’s what I thought,” agreed Ruth, a little wearily. “Anyway, I wouldn’t say anything about it to the boys for a while, Helen. We’ll wait until Charlie really does something before we complain. Besides, I can’t even be sure it was Charlie I saw. It may be that I’m thinking of him so much that I just naturally see him about me wherever I go.”

“Let’s hope that’s the answer, Ruth dear,” said Helen, going over to her chum and giving her a warm kiss. “In the meantime don’t go worrying your head about it. The two of us together are more than a match for Charlie Reid!”

Ruth was rather glad that Helen had planned to go to a matinée, for that left her perfectly free to attend to the very important business at hand—that of meeting and becoming acquainted with the actors, cameramen and assistant directors with whom she was to be so closely associated during the next few months.

They began to gather in her room shortly after two o’clock.

Edith Lang came first, accompanied by Layton Boardman, and these two both Ruth and Tom met with enthusiasm. They had been associated with the two actors in the making of Ruth’s last picture at Golden Pass and had liked and admired them immensely.

Boardman, who had taken the lead in Ruth’s picture, was a splendid actor of Western parts and a fine fellow as well. Edith Lang was the crippled actress who had given Ruth valuable pointers in an art in which she herself was very proficient.

Crippled as she had been while engaged in Red Cross work during the World War, and so more or less exiled from a profession that had been the breath of life to her, Edith Lang had once more come into her own.

Her part as the cripple in “The Girl of Gold” was a heavy emotional one, calling for exactly the type of acting which had made Edith Lang famous.

“I can’t tell you how happy it makes me to see you again,” she told Ruth, grasping the latter’s hands in both her own. “And under such very happy circumstances! My dear Miss Fielding, can you imagine slowly starving to death and then having presented to you a feast sumptuous beyond your wildest imaginings? That is what this rôle means to me!”

There were others gathering in the doorway, and Ruth went to meet them eagerly.

There were the two assistant directors, Gerard Bolton and Maurice Brandt. The former was a stockily built man with extremely broad shoulders and a forehead that jutted heavily over deep-set gray eyes. It was the forehead, Ruth decided after a second look, that made him look so pugnacious, as if, having once got hold of an idea, he would be extraordinarily slow to relinquish it.

However, he was pleasant enough, and his companion, Maurice Brandt, was extremely talkative and cordial.

Ruth decided that Maurice Brandt might prove a trifle too self-assertive upon further acquaintance, and then and there prepared to resist him with some self-assertiveness of her own.

The leading lady was Alice Lytelly, a fluffy little blonde who ought to do well in the rather unexacting title rôle. Despite the gushing greeting of the latter, Ruth read temperament in the stormy blue eyes of the star and the pouting, too-full, red lips. Ruth had had experience before with temperamental stars, and she knew just how to catalogue Miss Lytelly.

There were others in rôles of varying importance, from the tall, distinguished-looking “father” of the heroine and the pitiful, humpbacked dwarf who played the villain of the piece to the lad of eleven, freckle-faced and elfish, who took the part of the star’s younger brother and who by his astuteness and precocity managed to discover the designs of the villain and lead the hero to his hiding place.

This youngster, by name Eben Howe, was to become, as Tom teasingly said, his rival in Ruth’s affections. However much that may be an overstatement of fact, it certainly is true that Ruth liked the mischievous, freckled boy at sight and that Eben developed an adoration for the young director of the company that was like the devotion of a good-natured, tail-wagging collie dog.

Such was the general personnel of the company of actors Ruth was to direct in a moving picture of the first magnitude, “The Girl of Gold.”

The three cameramen, Traymore, Schultz and Atwater, were all pleasant and competent men, and Ruth felt instinctively that there would be little friction in her association with them.

Artists, every one of them in their line—in this day of the “super-film,” there is a great deal more importance to the work of the cameramen than is generally suspected—they all had heard of her and respected her ability and had decided to give their best in service to their youthful “chief.”

Ruth felt this and was grateful for it. But about the actors and the two directors, she was not so sure. She seemed to sense a slight undercurrent of resentment toward her—partly, perhaps, because of her youth, partly because of her sex.

But it was in the person of the dwarf that this resentment seemed to crystallize. Ruth shuddered merely to look at the deformed, twisted body of Joe Rumph. Once she caught his deep-set black eyes gazing intently at her from under beetling brows and beneath that somewhat sinister look her flesh actually crawled as though some slimy creature had trailed its length across her.

When it was over and they had all gone off, informed of Ruth’s plans for the morrow’s start, Ruth flung herself into a chair and pressed a hand over her eyes as though to shut out some unwelcome vision.

Tom, who had been thoroughly enjoying himself and who had found a kindred spirit in one of the jovial cameramen, Bert Traymore, looked surprised at Ruth’s strange gesture. He came over to her anxiously and rested a hand on her shoulder.

“Buck up, Ruth,” he said. “What’s wrong?”

“That horrid Joe Rumph,” cried Ruth, in a muffled voice, hands still pressed close before her eyes. “Did you notice how he looked at me? I don’t like him, Tom! Why, I’d just as soon take a venomous snake along with the company as that man!”