Probably the ex-showman was not as surprised to see Ruth Fielding as she was to see him. But he was the first, nevertheless, to speak.
"Ho! so it's you, is it?" he growled, scowling at the girl of the Red Mill. "Reckon you didn't expect to see me."
"I certainly did not," returned Ruth tartly. "What are you doing at Benbow Camp, Mr. Fenbrook?"
"I reckon you'd be glad to hear that I walked here," sneered the showman, and filled his cheek with a mighty mouthful. He wolfed this down in an instant, and added, with a wide grin: "But I didn't. I saved my horse an' outfit from the smash, and enough loose change to bring me West—no thanks to you."
"I am sorry to hear you have failed in business, Mr. Fenbrook," Ruth said composedly. "But I am sorrier to see that you consider me in a measure to blame for your misfortune."
"Oh, don't I, though!" snarled Dakota Joe. "I know who to thank for my bust-up—you and that Hammond man. Yes, sir-ree!"
"You are quite wrong," Ruth said, calmly. "But nothing I can say will convince you, I presume."
"You can't soft-sawder me, if that's what you mean," and Dakota Joe absorbed another mighty mouthful.
Ruth could not fail to wonder if he ever chewed his food. He seemed to swallow it as though he were a boa-constrictor.
"I know," said Dakota Joe, having swallowed the mouthful and washed it down with half a pannikin of coffee, "that you two takin' that Injun gal away from me was the beginning of my finish. Yes, sir-ree! I could ha' pulled through and made money in Chicago and St. Louis, and all along as I worked West this winter. But no, you fixed me for fair."
"Wonota had a perfect right to break with you, Mr. Fenbrook," Ruth said decidedly, and with some warmth. "You did not treat her kindly, and you paid her very little money."
"She got more money than she'd ever saw before. Them Injuns ain't used to much money. It's jest as bad for 'em as hootch. Yes, sir-ree!"
"She was worth more than you gave her. And she certainly was worthy of better treatment. But that is all over. Mr. Hammond has her tied up with a hard and fast contract. Let her alone, Mr. Fenbrook."
"Aw, don't you fret," growled the man. "I ain't come out here to trouble Wonota none. The little spitfire! She'd shoot me just as like's not if she took the notion. Them redskins ain't to be trusted—none of 'em. I know 'em only too well."
Ruth went out of the shack almost before the man had ceased speaking. She did not want anything further to do with him. She was exceedingly sorry that Dakota Joe had appeared at Benbow Camp just when the moving picture company was getting to work on the important scenes of "Brighteyes." Besides, she felt a trifle anxious because Mr. Hammond himself did not chance to be here under the present circumstances. He might be better able to handle Dakota Joe if the ruffian made trouble.
She said nothing to Jim Hooley about Dakota Joe. She did not wish to bother the director in any case. She had come to appreciate Hooley as, in a sense, a creative genius who should have his mind perfectly free of all other subjects—especially of annoying topics of thought—if he was to turn out a thoroughly good picture. Hooley fairly lived in the picture while the scenes were being shot. He must not be troubled by the knowledge of the possibility of Dakota Joe's being at Benbow Camp for some ulterior purpose.
Ruth told the girls about the man's appearance when she returned to the shacks where the members of the moving picture company were spending the night. And she warned Wonota in particular, and in private.
"He is as angry with us as he can be," the girl of the Red Mill told the Osage maiden. "I think, if I were you, Wonota, I would beware of him."
"Beware of Dakota Joe?" repeated Wonota.
"Yes."
"I would beware of him? I would shoot him?" said the Osage girl with suddenly flashing eyes. "That is what you mean?"
Ruth laughed in spite of her anxiety. "Beware" was plainly a word outside the Indian girl's vocabulary.
"Don't talk like a little savage," she admonished Wonota, more severely than usual. "Of course you are not to shoot the man. You are just to see that he does you no harm—watch out for him when he is in your vicinity."
"Oh! I'll watch Dakota Joe all right," promised Wonota with emphasis. "Don't you worry about that, Miss Fielding. I'll watch him."
To Ruth's mind it seemed that the ex-showman, in his anger, was likely to try to punish the Indian girl for leaving his show, or to do some harm to the picture-making so as to injure Mr. Hammond. He had already (or so Ruth believed) endeavored to hurt Ruth herself when she was all but run over in New York. Ruth did not expect a second attack upon herself.
The next morning—the really "great day" of the picture taking—all at the camp were aroused by daybreak. There was not a soul—to the very cook of the timber-camp outfit—who was not interested in the matter. The freshet Jim Hooley had planned had to be handled in just the right way and everything connected with it must be done in the nick of time.
Wonota in her Indian canoe—a carefully selected one and decorated in Indian fashion—was embarked on the sullen stream above the timber-boom. The holding back of the water and the driftwood had formed an angry stretch of river which under ordinary circumstances Ruth and the other girls who had accompanied her West thought they would have feared to venture upon. The Indian girl, however, seemed to consider the circumstances not at all threatening.
With her on the river, but instructed to keep on either side and well out of the focus of the cameras, were two expert rivermen, each in a canoe. These men were on the alert to assist Wonota if, when the dam was broken, she should get into any difficulty.
Below the dam the men were arranged at important points, so that if the logs and drift threatened to pile up after the boom was cut, they could jump in with their pike-poles and keep the drift moving. On one shore the cameras were placed, and Jim Hooley, with his megaphone, stood on a prominent rock.
Across from the director's station Ruth found a spot at the foot of a sheer bank to the brow of which a great pile of logs had been rolled, ready for the real freshet in the spring when the log-drives would start. She had a good view of all that went on across the river, and up the stream.
Jennie suggested that she and Helen accompany Ruth and watch the taking of the picture from that vantage point, a proposal to which Helen readily agreed. But Ruth evaded this suggestion of her two friends, for she wanted to keep her whole mind on her work, and when Helen and Jennie were with her she found it impossible to keep from listening to their merry chatter, nor could she keep herself from being drawn into it. The upshot was that, after some discussion by the three girls, Ruth set off alone for her station under the brow of the steep river bank.
About ten o'clock, in mid-forenoon, Hooley was satisfied that everything was ready to shoot the picture. One of the foremen of Benbow Camp—the best ax wielder of the crew—ran out on the boom to a point near the middle of the frothing stream and began cutting the key-log. It was a ticklish piece of work; but these timbermen were used to such jobs.
The gash in the log showed wider and wider. Where Ruth stood she cocked her head to listen to the strokes of the axman. It seemed to her that there was a particularly strange echo, flattened but keen, as though reverberating from the bank of the river high above her head.
"Now, what can that be?" she thought, and once looked up the slope to the heap of logs which were held in place by chocks on the very verge of the steep descent.
If those logs should break away, Ruth realized that she was right in the path of their descent. It would not be easy for her to escape, dry-footed, In either direction, for the bank of the river, both up, and down stream, was rough.
But, of course, that chopping sound was made by the man cutting the boom. Surely nobody was using an ax up there on the pile of logs. She glanced back to the man teetering on the boom log. The gap in it was wide and white. He had cut on the down-river side. Already the pressure from up stream was forcing the gash open, wider and wider——
There came a yell from across the river. Somebody there had seen what was threatening over Ruth's head. Then Jim Hooley cast his glance that way and yelled through his megaphone:
"Jump, Miss Fielding! Quick! Jump into the river!"
But at that moment the man on the boom started for the shore, running frantically for safety. The key log split with a raucous sound. The water and drift-stuff, in a mounting wave, poured through the gap, and the noise of it deafened Ruth Fielding to all other sounds.
She did not even glance back and above again at the peril which menaced her from the top of the steep bank.
"This stunt business," as Director Hooley called the taking of such pictures as this, is always admittedly a gamble. After much time and hundreds of dollars have been spent in getting ready to shoot a scene, some little thing may go wrong and spoil the whole thing.
There was nothing the matter with the director's plans on this occasion; every detail of the "freshet" had been made ready for with exactness and with prodigious regard to detail.
The foreman had cut the key log almost through and the force of the water and débris behind the boom had broken it. The man barely escaped disaster by reason of agile legs and sharp caulks on his boots.
The backed-up waters burst through. Up stream, amid the turmoil and murk of the agitated flood, rode Wonota in her canoe, directly into the focus of the great cameras. To keep her canoe head-on with the flood, and to keep it from being overturned, was no small matter. It required all the Indian girl's skill to steer clear of snags and floating logs. Besides, she must remember to register as she shot down the stream a certain emotion which would reveal to the audience her condition of mind, as told in the story.
Wonota did her part. She was rods above the breaking dam and she could not see, because of an overhanging tree on Ruth's side of the stream, any of that peril which suddenly threatened the white girl. Wonota was as unconscious of what imperiled Ruth as the latter was at first unknowing of the coming catastrophe.
It was Jim Hooley whom the incident startled and alarmed more than anybody else. He committed an unpardonable sin—unpardonable for a director! He forgot, when everything was ready, to order the starting of the camera. Instead he put his megaphone to his lips and shouted across to Ruth Fielding—who was not supposed to be in the picture at all:
"Jump, Miss Fielding! Quick! Jump into the river!"
And Ruth did not hear him, loudly as his voice boomed across the flood! She was deafened by the thunder of the waters and the crashing of the logs in mid-flood. Her eyes, now that she was sure the foreman was safe on the other bank, were fixed upon the bow of Wonota's canoe, just coming into sight behind the ware of foaming water and upreared, charging timbers.
It was a great sight—a wonderful sight. No real freshet could have been more awful to behold. Mr. Hooley's feat was a masterstroke!
But behind and above Ruth was a scene of disaster that held those on the opposite bank speechless—after Hooley's first mighty shout of warning. At least, all but the camera men were so transfixed by the thing that was happening above the unconscious Ruth.
Trained to their work, the camera men had been ready to crank their machines when Hooley grabbed up his megaphone. The boom had burst, the flood poured down, and the Indian maid's canoe came into the range of their lenses.
It was the most natural thing in the world that they should begin cranking—and this they did! Alone among all those on the far bank of the stream, the camera men were blind to Ruth's danger.
"She'll be killed!" shrieked Jennie Stone, while Helen Cameron ran to the water's edge, stretching forth her arms to Ruth as though she would seize her from across the stream.
The next moment the water flooded up around Helen's ankles. The stream was rising, and had Jennie not dragged her back, Helen would have been knee-deep in the water—perhaps have been injured herself by one of the flying logs.
Ruth was out of reach of the logs in the stream, although they charged down with mighty clamor, their ends at times shooting a dozen feet into the air, the bark stripping in ragged lengths, displaying angry gashes along their flanks. It was from that great heap of logs above, on the brink of the steep bank, that Ruth was in danger.
A fringe of low brush had hidden the foot of the logpile up there. This hedge had also hidden from the observation of the party across the stream the villains who must have deliberately knocked out the chocks which held the high pile of timbers from skidding down the slope.
Mr. Hooley had seen the logs start. Squeezed out by the weight of the pile, the lower logs, stripped of bark and squealing like living creatures started over the brink. They rolled, faster and faster, down upon the unwarned Ruth Fielding. And behind the leaders poured the whole pile, gathering speed as the avalanche made headway!
The turmoil of the river and the crashing logs would have smothered the sound of the avalanche until it was upon the girl of the Red Mill. No doubt of that. But providentially Ruth flashed a glance across the stream. She saw the party there all screaming at her and waving their arms madly. Jennie was just dragging Helen back from the rising flood of the turbulent river. Ruth saw by their actions that they were trying to draw her attention to something behind her.
She swung about and looked up the almost sheer bluff.
Ruth Fielding was not lacking in quick comprehension. A single glance at the descending avalanche of logs was sufficient to make her understand the peril. She knew that she could not clear the hurtling timbers by running either up stream or down. The way was too rough. As well as Jim Hooley, she knew that escape was only possible by leaping into the river. And that chance was rather uncertain.
Ruth was dressed for the rough outdoor life she was living. She wore high, laced boots, a short skirt, knickerbockers, a blouse, and a broad-brimmed hat.
When she turned to face the turbulent stream the rocking timbers coming down with the released water almost filled the pool before the endangered girl.
Had she worn caulks on the soles of her boots, as did the foreman who had cut the boom, and been practised as he was in "running the logs," Ruth would have stood a better chance of escaping the plunging avalanche. As it was, she was not wholly helpless.
She had picked up a peavey one of the timbermen had left on this bank and was using is as a staff as she watched the "freshet" start. Warned now of the danger she was in, the girl of the Red Mill seized this staff firmly in both hands and poised herself to leap from the boulder to which she had stepped.
Only a moment did she delay—just long enough to select the most promising log in the smother of foam and water before her. Then she leaped outward, striking down with the pike-staff and sinking its sharp point in the log to which she jumped.
Behind her the timbers poured down the bluff, landed on their splintering ends on the rocks, and then—many of them—pitched their long lengths into the angry river.
The spray flew yards high. It curtained, indeed, all that occurred for the next few moments upon this side of the stream. However much the scene, arranged by Jim Hooley might need the attention of the moving picture makers, here was a greater and more dangerous happening, in which Ruth Fielding was the leading participant!
Tragedy was very dose indeed at that moment to the girl of the Red Mill. Many adventures had touched Ruth nearly; but nothing more perilous had threatened her than this.
She balanced herself on the rushing log with the help of the peavey. She was more than ordinarily sure-footed. But if the log she rode chanced to be hit by one of the falling timbers loosened from their station on top of the bluff—that would be the end of the incident, and the end of the girl as well!
Perhaps it was well that Helen and Jennie could no longer see their chum. The curtain of spray thrown up by the plunging logs from above hid the whole scene for several minutes.
Then out of the turmoil on the river shot the log on which Ruth stood, appearing marvelously to her friends on the other bank.
"Ruth! Ruth Fielding!" shrieked Helen, so shrilly that her voice really could be heard. "Are you alive?"
Ruth waved one hand. She held her balance better now. She shot a glance behind and saw Wonota in the canoe coming down the rapids amid the snags and drifting débris—a wonderful picture!
Jim Hooley, almost overcome by the shock and fright, suddenly beheld his two camera men cranking steadily—as unruffled as though all this uproar and excitement was only the usual turmoil of the studio!
"Bully, boys!" the director shouted. "Keep at it!" Then through the megaphone: "Eyes on the camera, Wonota! Your lover is in the water—you must save him! Nobody else can reach him There! He's going down again! Bend forward—look at him—at the camera! That's it! When he appears again that log is going to hit him if you do not swerve the canoe in between the log and him—There! With your paddle! Shoot the canoe in now!"
He swerved the megaphone to the men waiting on the bank: "Look out for Miss Fielding, some of you fellows. The rest of you stand ready to grab Wonota when that canoe goes over."
Again to the Indian girl: "Now, Wonota! Pitch the paddle away. Lean over—grab at his head. There it is!"
The Indian girl did as instructed, leaning so far that the canoe tipped. Mr. Hooley raised his hand. He snapped his fingers. "There! Enough!" he shouted, and the cameras stopped as the canoe canted the Indian girl headfirst into the stream. The rest of that scene would be taken in quiet water.
While the man waded in to help Wonota, Ruth reached the bank and sprang off her log before she was butted off. Helen and Jennie ran to her, and such a hullabaloo as there was for a few minutes!
Jim Hooley came striding down to the three Eastern girls, flushed and with scowling brow.
"I want to know who did that?" he shouted. "No thanks to anybody but my camera men that the whole scene wasn't a fizzle. And what would Mr. Hammond have said? Who were those men, Miss Fielding?"
"What men?" asked Ruth in wonder.
"Up there on the other bank? Those that knocked the chocks out from under that heap of logs? You don't suppose that avalanche of timber started all by itself?"
"I don't know what you are talking about, Mr. Hooley," declared Ruth Fielding.
"And surely," Helen added quickly, "you do not suppose that it was her fault? She might have been killed."
"I got a glimpse of a man dodging out of the way just as that pile of logs started. I saw the flash of the sun on his ax," and the director was very much in earnest.
It was Jennie who put into words the thought that had come both to Ruth and Helen as well:
"Where is that awful Dakota Joe? He was here last night. He has tried to harm our Ruthie before. I do believe he did it!"
"Who's that?" demanded the director. "The man who had Wonota in his show?"
"Yes, Mr. Hooley. He was here last night. I spoke with him up in the bunk-house while you were telling the boys about this scene," Ruth said gravely.
"The unhung villain!" exclaimed the director. "He tried to ruin our shot."
Jennie stared at him with open mouth as well as eyes.
"Well!" she gasped after a minute. "That is what you might call being wrapped up in one's business, sure enough! Ruined your shot, indeed! How about ruining a perfectly good girl named Ruth Fielding?"
"Oh, I beg Miss Fielding's pardon," stammered the director. "You must remember that taking such a scene as this costs the corporation a good deal of money. Miss Fielding's danger, I must say, threw me quite off my balance. If I didn't have two of the keenest camera men in the business all this," and he gestured toward the turbulent river, "would have gone for nothing."
"I can thank Mr. Hooley for what he tried to do for me," smiled Ruth. "I saw his gestures if I could not hear his voice. That was my salvation. But I believe it must have been Dakota Joe who started that avalanche of logs down upon me."
"I'll have the scoundrel looked for," promised Hooley, turning to go upstream again.
"But don't tell these rough men why you want Dakota Joe," advised the girl of the Red Mill.
"No?"
"You know how they are—even some of the fellows working for the picture company. They are pretty rough themselves. I do not want murder done because of my narrow escape."
The other girls cried out at this, but Mr. Hooley nodded understandingly.
"I get you, Miss Fielding. But I'll make it so he can't try any capers around here again. No, sir!"
The girls were left to discuss the awful peril that had threatened, and come so near to over-coming, Ruth. Helen was particularly excited about it.
"I do think, Ruth, that we should start right for home. This is altogether too savage a country. To think of that rascal daring to do such a thing! For of course it was Dakota Joe who started those logs to rolling."
"I can imagine nobody else doing it," confessed her chum.
"Then I think you should start East at once," repeated Helen. "Don't you think so, Jennie?"
"I'd hire a guard," said the plump girl. "This country certainly is not safe for our Ruth."
"Neither was New York, it seemed," rejoined Ruth, with a whimsical smile. "Of course we are not sure—"
"We are sure you came near losing your life," interrupted Helen.
"Quite so. I was in danger. But if it was Joe, he has run away, of course. He will not be likely to linger about here after making the attempt."
And to this opinion everybody else who knew about it agreed. A search was made by some of the men for Dakota Joe. It was said he had left for another logging camp far to the north before daybreak that very morning. Nobody had seen him since that early hour.
"Just the same, he hung around long enough to start those logs to rolling. And I am not sure but that he had help," Jim Hooley said, talking the matter over later, after Mr. Hammond had arrived from the railroad and had been told about the incident, "He is a dangerous fellow, that Fenbrook."
"He has made himself a nuisance," agreed Mr. Hammond. "Tell William and the other boys to keep their eyes open for him. The moment he appears again—if he does appear—let them grab him. I will get a warrant sworn out at Clearwater for his arrest. We will put him in jail until our picture is finished, at least."
They did not believe at the time that Ruth was in any further peril from Dakota Joe. As for the girls, they were particularly excited just then by some news Mr. Hammond had brought with him from the post-office.
Letters from Tom Cameron! He was coming home! Indeed, he would have started before Ruth and Helen received the messages he wrote. And in Ruth's letter he promised a great surprise. What that surprise was the girl of the Red Mill could not imagine.
"Doesn't he say anything about a surprise for me?" demanded Jennie Stone.
"He doesn't say a word about you in my letter, Heavy," said Helen wickedly.
"Why, Jennie, he doesn't know you are with us here in the West," Ruth said soothingly.
"I don't care," sputtered the fat girl. "He must know about my Henri. And not a word have I heard from or about him in a month. If the war is over, surely Henri must be as free as Tom Cameron."
"I suppose some of the soldiers have to stay along the Rhine, Jennie, dear," replied Ruth. "Maybe Henri is one of those guarding the frontier."
"He is holding the German hordes back, single-handed, from la belle France," put in Helen, smiling.
"Oh, cat's foot!" snapped Jennie. "The Germans are just as glad to stop fighting as we are. They certainly don't need Henri in the army any longer. I am going to write to his mother!"
Wonota had known nothing of what was supposed to have been a deliberate attempt to injure Ruth Fielding until some hours after the occurrence. She had not much to say about it, but, like the three white girls, she was sure the guilty man was Dakota Joe.
As William had said, Fenbrook was a "mighty mean man," and the Osage maid knew that to be a fact. She nodded her head gravely as she commented upon the incident that might have ended so seriously.
"That Dakota Joe is bad. Chief Totantora would have sent him to the spirit land long since, had he been here. There are white men, Miss Fielding, who are much worse than any redman."
"I will grant you that," sighed Ruth. "Badness is not a matter of blood, I guess. This Fenbrook has no feeling or decency. He is dangerous."
"I should have shot him," declared the Osage girl confidently. "I am afraid I have done wrong in not doing so before."
"How can you talk so recklessly!" exclaimed Ruth, and she was really troubled. "Shooting Dakota Joe would make you quite as bad as he is. No, no! That is not the way to feel about it."
But Wonota could not understand this logic.
And yet, Wonota in other ways was not at all reckless or ferocious. She possessed a fund of sympathy, and was kindly disposed toward everybody When one of the cook's helpers cut his foot with an ax, she aided in the rough surgery furnished by the camp boss, and afterwards nursed the invalid while he was confined to his bunk and could not even hop about.
All the men liked her, and after a time they did not speak carelessly of her as "that Injun gal." She seemed to be of a different caliber from the other Indians engaged in making the picture. At least, she was more intelligent.
The girls from the East did not lose their personal interest in Wonota in the least degree. But of course while the various scenes were being made even Ruth did not give all her attention to either the Indian maiden or to the shooting of the picture.
The great freshet scene, when developed and tried out in the projection room at Clearwater, proved to be a very striking film indeed. If "Brighteyes" was to rise to the level of that one scene, every reel of the picture must be photographed with great care.
While the director and Mr. Hammond and the company in general worked over some of the lumber-camp scenes, retaking or arranging for the shots over and over again, Ruth rode with her two chums on many a picturesque trail around Benbow Camp, Hubbell Ranch and the Clearwater station of the railroad.
They were quite sure that Dakota Joe Fenbrook had left this part of the country—and left in a hurry. If he learned that his attempt on Ruth Fielding's life was not successful, he must have learned it some time after the occurrence. Just where the "bad man" had gone after leaving Benbow on the run, nobody seemed to know.
Ruth and Helen and Jennie were in the saddle almost every day. They found much to interest them on the various trails they followed. They even discovered and visited several pioneer families—"nesters" in the language of the cowpunchers and stockmen—who welcomed the Eastern girls with vast curiosity.
"And how some of these folks can live in such Wild places, and in such perfectly barren cabins, I do not see," groaned Helen Cameron after a visit to one settler's family near a wild canyon to the west of Benbow Camp. "That woman and those girls! Not a decent garment to their backs, and the men so rough and uncouth. I would not stay there on a bet—not for the best man who ever breathed."
"That woman's husband isn't the best man who ever breathed," said Jennie, grimly. "But perhaps he is the best man she ever knew. And, anyway, having as the boys say 'got stuck on him,' now she is plainly 'stuck with him.' In other words she has made her own bed and must lie in it."
"Why should people be punished for their ignorance?" complained Helen.
"Nature's way," said Ruth confidently. "Civilization is slowly changing that—or trying to. But nature's law is, after all, rather harsh to us."
"If I was one of those girls we saw back there," Helen continued, "I would run away."
"Run where?" asked Ruth slyly. "With a movie company? Or a Wild West Show?"
"Either. Anything would be better than that hut and the savagery of their present lives."
"They don't mind it so much," admitted Jennie. "I asked one of them. She was looking forward to a dance next week. She said they had three of four through the year—and they seemed to be reckoned as great treats, but all a girl could expect."
"And think how much we demand," said Ruth thoughtfully. "Welladay! Maybe we have too much—too much of the good things of the earth."
"Bah!" exclaimed Helen, with disgust. "One can't get too much of the good things. No, ma'am! Take all you can——"
"And give nothing?" suggested Ruth, shaking her head.
"Nobody can say with truth that you are selfish, Ruthie Fielding," put in Jennie. "In fact, you are always giving, and never taking."
Ruth laughed at this. "You are wrong," she said. "The more you give the more you get. At least, I find it so. And we are getting right now, on this trip to the great Northwest, much more than we are giving. I feel as though I would be condemned if I did not do something for these hard-working people who are doing their part in developing this country—the settlers, and even the timbermen."
"You want to be a lady Santa Claus to that bunch of roughnecks at Benbow Camp, do you?" laughed Jennie.
"Well, I would like to help somebody besides Wonota. What do you hear from your New York dressmaker about Wonota's new outfit, Jennie?"
"It will be shipped right out here to Clearwater before long," announced the plump girl, with new satisfaction. "Won't Wonota be surprised?"
"And delighted!" added Helen, showing satisfaction too.
At that very moment they rode out of a patch of wood which had hidden from the girls' eyes a piece of lowland fringed by a grove of northern cottonwood trees. On the air was borne a deep bellow—a sound that none of the three had noted before.
"What is that?" demanded Helen, startled and half drawing in her snorting pony.
"Oh, listen!" cried Jennie. "Hear the poor cow."
Ruth was inclined to doubt. "When you hear a 'cow' bellowing in this country, look out. It may be a wild steer or a very ugly bull. Let us go on cautiously."
All three of the ponies showed signs of trepidation, and this fact added to Ruth's easily aroused anxiety.
"Have a care," she said to Helen and Jennie. "I believe something is going on here that spells danger—for us at least."
"It's down in the swamp. See the way the ponies look," agreed Jennie.
They quickly came to a break in the cottonwood grove on the edge of the morass. Instantly the ponies halted, snorting again. Ruth's tried to rear and turn, but she was a good horsewoman.
"Oh, look!" squealed Helen. "A bear!"
"Oh, look!" echoed Jennie, quite as excited. "A bull!"
"Well, I declare!" exclaimed Ruth, her hands full for the moment with the actions of her mount. "One would think you were looking at a picture of Wall Street—with your bulls and your bears I Let me see—do!"
Ruth wheeled her mount the next moment and headed it again in the right direction. She saw at last what had caused her two companions such wonder.
In a deep hole near the edge of the morass was a huge Hereford bull. Most of the cattle in that country were Herefords.
The animal had without doubt become foundered in the swamp hole; but that was by no means the worst that had happened to him. While held more than belly-deep in the sticky mud he had been attacked by the only kind of bear in all the Rockies that, unless under great provocation, attacks anything bigger than woodmice.
A big black bear had flung itself upon the back of the bellowing, struggling bull and was tearing and biting the poor creature's head and neck—actually eating the bull by piecemeal!
"Oh, horrors!" gasped Helen, sickened by the sight of the blood and the ferocity of the bear. "Is that a dreadful grizzly? How terrible!"
"It's eating the poor bull alive!" Jennie cried.
Ruth had never ridden out from camp since Dakota Joe's last appearance without carrying a light rifle in her saddle scabbard. She rode a regular stockman's saddle and liked the ease and comfort of it.
Now she seized her weapon and cocked It.
"That is not a grizzly, girls!" she exclaimed. "The grizzly is ordinarily a tame animal beside this fellow. The blackbear is the meat-eater—and the man-killer, too. I learned all about that in our first trip out here to the West."
"Quick! Do something for that poor steer!" begged Helen. "Never mind lecturing about it."
But Ruth had been wasting no time while she talked. She first had to get her pony to stand She knew it was not gun-shy. It was only the scent and sight of the bear that excited it.
Once the pony's four feet were firmly set, the girl of the Red Mill, who was no bad shot, raised her rifle and sighted down the barrel at the little snarling eyes of Bruin behind his open, red jaws. The bear crouched on the bull's back and actually roared at the girls who had come to disturb him at his savage feast.
Ruth's trigger-finger was firm. It was an automatic rifle, and although it fired a small ball, the girl had drawn a good bead on the bear's most vulnerable point—the base of his wicked brain! The several bullets poured into that spot, severing the vertebrae and almost, indeed, tearing the head from the brute's shoulders!
"Oh, Ruth! You've done for him!" cried Helen, with delight.
"But the poor bull!" murmured Jennie. "See! He can't get out. He's done for."
"I am afraid they are both done for," returned Ruth. "Take this gun, Jennie. Let me see if I can rope the bull and help him out."
She swung the puncher's lariat she carried hung from her saddle-bow with much expertness. She had practised lariat throwing on her previous trips to the West. But although she was able to encircle the bull's bleeding head with the noose of the rope, to drag the creature out of the morass was impossible.
He was sunk in the mire too deeply, and he was too far gone now to help himself. The bear had rolled off the back of the bull and after a few faint struggles ceased to live. But Bruin's presence made it very difficult for the girls to force their ponies closer to the dying bull.
Therefore, after all, Ruth had to abandon her lariat, tying the end of it to a tree and by this means keeping the bull from sinking out of sight after she had put a merciful bullet into him.
As they rode near the Hubbell Ranch they stopped and told of their adventure at the swamp, and a party of the boys rode out and saved both bear and bull meat from the coyotes or from cougars that sometimes came down from the hills.
The three girls had not been idly riding about the country during these several days which had been punctuated, as it were, with the adventure of the bull and the bear. That very day they had found the canyon which Mr. Hammond and the director had been hoping to find and use in filming some of the most thrilling scenes of "Brighteyes."
As Ruth was the writer of the scenario it was natural that she should be quite capable of choosing the location. The lovely and sheltered canyon offered all that was needed for the taking of the scenes indicated.
The girls went back the next day, taking Mr. Hammond with them. This time they merely glanced at the spot where the bear and the bull had died, and they did not visit the family of nesters at all. The shadowy mouth of the canyon, its sides running up steeply into the hills, was long in sight before the little cavalcade reached it.
From the mouth of it Mr. Hammond could not judge if Ruth's selection of locality was a wise one. Certain natural attributes were necessary to fit the needs of the story she had written. When, after they had ridden a couple of miles up the canyon, he saw the cliff path and the lip of the overhanging rock on which the hero of the story and Brighteyes' Indian lover were to struggle, he proclaimed himself satisfied.
"You've got it, I do believe," the producer declared. "This will delight Jim Hooley, I am sure. We can stake out a net down here under that rock so if either or both the boys fall, they will land all right. It will be some stunt picture, and no mistake!"
He wanted to look around the place, however, before riding back, and the girls dismounted too. The bottom of the canyon was a smooth lawn—the grass still green. For although the tang of winter was now in the air even at noon, the weather had been remarkably pleasant. Only on the distant heights had the snow fallen, and not much there.
There was a silvery stream wandering through the meadow over which the girls walked. By one pool was a shallow bit of beach, and Ruth, coming upon this alone, suddenly cried out:
"Oh, Helen! Jennie! I am a Miss Crusoe. Come here and see the unmistakable mark of my Man Friday."
"What do you mean, you ridiculous thing?" drawled Jennie. "You cannot be a Crusoe. You are not dressed in skins."
"Well, I like that!" rejoined Ruth, raising her eyebrows in apparent surprise, "I should think I was covered with skin. Why not? Am I different from the remainder of humanity?"
Of course they laughed with her as they came to view her discovery upon the sand. It was the mark of a human foot.
"And no savage, I'll be bound," said Helen. "That is the mark of a mighty brogan. A white man's foot-covering, no less. See! There is another footprint."
"He certainly was going away from here," Jennie Stone observed. "Who do you suppose he is?"
"I wonder if his eyes are blue and if he has a moustache?" queried Helen, languishingly.
"Bet he has whiskers and chews tobacco. I known these Western men. Bah!"
"Jennie takes all the romance out of it," said Ruth, laughing. "Now I don't care to meet my Man Friday at all."
They ate a picnic lunch before they rode out of the lovely canyon. Mr. Hammond was always good company, and he exerted himself to be interesting to the three girls on this occasion.
"My!" Helen remarked to Jennie, "Ruth does make the nicest friends, doesn't she? See how much fun—how many good times—we have had through her acquaintanceship with Mr. Hammond."
Jennie agreed. But her attention was attracted just then to something entirely different. She was staring up the cliff path that Mr. Hammond had praised as being just the natural landmark needed for the scene the company wished to picture.
"Did you see what I saw?" drawled the plump girl. "Or am I thinking too, too much about mankind?"
"What is the matter with you?" demanded Helen. "I didn't see any man."
"Not up that rocky way—there! A brown coat and a gray hat. Did you see?"
"Ruth's Man Friday!" ejaculated Helen.
"I shouldn't wonder. But we can't prove it because we haven't the size of yonder gentleman's boot. Humph I he is running away from us, all right."
"Maybe he never saw us," suggested Helen.
They called to Ruth and told her of the glimpse they had had of the stranger.
"And what did he run away for, do you suppose?" demanded Jennie.
"I am sure you need not ask me," said Ruth. "What did he look like?"
"I did not see his face," said Jennie. She repeated what she had already said to Helen about the stranger's gray hat and brown coat.
Ruth looked somewhat troubled and made no further comment Of course, the coat and hat were probably like the coat and hat of numberless other men in the West. But the last time Ruth had seen Dakota Joe Fenbrook, that individual had been wearing a broad-brimmed gray sombrero and a brown duck coat.
Ruth Fielding was not a coward. She had already talked so much about Dakota Joe that she was a little ashamed to bring up the subject again. So she made no comment upon the man in the brown coat and gray hat that Jennie Stone declared she had seen climbing the path up the canyon wall.
Mr. Hammond was not annoyed by it. His mind was fixed upon the scenes that could be filmed in the canyon. Like Jim Hooley, the director, his thought was almost altogether taken up with the making of Ruth's "Brighteyes."
The work of making the picture was almost concluded. Wonota, the Indian maid, had lost none of her interest in the tasks set her; but she expressed herself to Ruth as being glad that there was little more to do.
"I do not like some things I have to do," she confessed. "It is so hard to look, as Mr. Hooley tells me to, at that hero of yours, Miss Fielding, as though I admired him."
"Mr. Grand? You do not like him?"
"I could never love him," said the Indian girl with confidence. "He is too silly. Even when we are about to engage in one of the most thrilling scenes, he looks first in the handglass to see if his hair is parted right."
Ruth could not fail to be amused. But she said cautiously:
"But think how he would look to the audience if his hair was tousled when it was supposed to be well brushed."
"Ah, it is not a manly task," said Wonota, with disgust. "And the Indian man who is the villain—Tut! He is only half Indian. And he tries to look both as though he admired me and hated the white man. It makes his eyes go this way!" and Wonota crossed her eyes until Ruth had to cry out.
"Don't!" she begged, "Suppose you suffered that deformity?"
"But he doesn't—that Jack Onehorse. Your Brighteyes, I am sure, would have felt no pity for such an Indian."
"You don't have to feel pity for him," laughed Ruth. "You know, you shoot him in the end, Wonota."
"Most certainly," agreed Wonota, closing her lips firmly. "He deserves shooting."
The calm way in which the Indian girl spoke of this taking off of the Indian lover who became the villain in the end of the moving picture, rather shocked the young author.
"But," said Jennie, "Wonota it only a single generation removed from arrant savagery. She calls a spade a spade. You shouldn't blame her. It is civilization—which is after all a sort of make-believe—that causes us white folk to refer to a spade as an agricultural implement."
But Ruth would not laugh. She had become so much interested in Wonota by this time that she wished her to improve her opportunities and learn the ways—the better ways, at least—of white people.
Mr. Hammond naturally looked at the commercial end of Wonota's improvement. Nor did Ruth overlook the chance the Osage maid had of becoming a money-earning star in the moving picture firmament. But she desired to help the girl to something better than mere money.
Wonota responded to a marked degree to Ruth's efforts. She was naturally refined. The Indian is not by nature coarse and crude. He is merely different from the whites. Wonota seemed to select for herself, when she had the opportunity, the better things obtainable—the better customs of the whites rather than the ruder ones.
Meanwhile the work of preparing for the scenes of "Brighteyes" to be shot in the canyon went on. The day came when all the company were informed that the morrow would see the work begun. At daybreak, after a hasty breakfast, the motors and vans and the cavalcade of riders left the Clearwater station for a week—and that the last week of their stay—up in the lovely canyon Ruth and her two girl chums had found.
"I do declare!" exclaimed the gay Jennie (even the lack of letters from Henri Marchand could not quench her spirits for long), "this bunch of tourists does look like an old-time emigrant train. We might be following the Santa Fe Trail, all so merrily."
"Only there were no motor-cars in those old days," remarked Ruth.
"Nor portable stoves," put in Helen with a smile.
"And I am quite sure," suggested Mr. Hammond, who heard this, "that no moving picture cameras went along with the old Santa Fe Trailers."
"Yet," said Ruth thoughtfully, "the country about here, at any rate, is just about as wild as it was in those old days. And perhaps some of the people are quite as savage as they were in the old days. Oh, dear!"
"Who are you worrying about? William?" asked Helen slyly. "He did sound savage this morning when he was harnessing those mules to the big wagon."
But her chum did not reply to this pleasantry. She really had something on her mind which bothered her. But she did not explain the cause of her anxiety to the others, even after the arrival of the party in the canyon.
It looked like a great Gypsy camp when the party was settled on the sward beside the mountain stream. Mr. Hooley had not seen the location before, and he was somewhat critical of some points. But finally he admitted that, unless the place had been built for their need, they could not really expect to find a location better fitted.
"And thank goodness!" Ruth sighed, when the camera points were severally decided upon, "after these shots are taken we can head East for good."
"Why, Ruthie! I thought we were having a dandy time," exclaimed Helen. "Have you lost your old love for the wild and open places?"
"I certainly will be glad to see a porcelain bathtub again," yawned Jennie, breaking in. "I don't really feel as though a sponge-down in an icy cold brook with a tarpaulin around one for a bath-house is altogether the height of luxury."
"It is out here," laughed Helen.
"I do not mind the inconveniences so much," said Ruth reflectively. "The old Red Mill farmhouse was not very conveniently arranged—above stairs, at least—until I had it built over at my own expense, greatly to Uncle Jabez's opposition. It is not the roughing it. That is good for us I verily believe. But I have a depressing feeling that before the picture is done something may happen."
"I should expect it would!" cried Helen, not at all disturbed by the prophecy. Once Helen had prophesied disaster, and it had come. But she forgot that now. "I expect something to happen—every day, most likely. But of course it will be a pleasant and exciting something. Yes, indeedy!"
Neither of her friends, after all, realized that Ruth Fielding was actually in fear. She was very anxious every waking moment. That strange man whom the girls had spied here in the canyon might be a perfectly harmless person. And then again—
Two days were occupied in placing the paraphernalia and training the actors in their parts. They all got a working knowledge of what was expected of them when the picture was being photographed, and the principals learned their lines. For nowadays almost as much care is given to what is said by actors before the camera as by those having speaking parts upon the stage.
The big scene—the really big scene in the drama—was set upon that overhanging lip of rock that Ruth had spied when first she, with Helen and Jennie, had ridden up the trail. On that overhanging shelf occurred the struggle between the white lover of Brighteyes and the Indian who had trailed him and the girl to this wild spot.
Mr. Grand, in spite of Wonota's scorn of him, was a handsome man and made as fine an appearance in the out-of-door garments the part called for as he did in the dress-suit to which he was so much addicted. The Indian who played the part of the villain was an excellent actor and had appeared many times on the silver sheet. He was earnest in his desire to please the director, but he failed sometimes to "keep in the picture" when he was not actually dominating a scene.
Because of this failing in John Onehorse, Mr. Hooley sent Ruth to the top of the rock to watch and advise Onehorse as the scene proceeded.
She was quite able by this time to act as assistant director. Indeed, it was Ruth's ambition to direct a picture of her own in the near future. She sometimes had ideas that conflicted with those of Mr. Hammond and his directors, and she wished to try her own way to get certain results.
Now, however, she was to follow Mr. Hooley's instructions exactly.
The arrangement of the cameras were such, both from below and at the level of the scene to be shot, that Ruth had to stand upon a narrow shelf quite out of sight of the actors on the overhanging rock, and hidden as well from most of the people below. This, to make sure that she was out of the line of the camera.
Behind her the narrow and broken trail led to the top of the canyon wall. It was up this trail that Jennie and Helen had seen the "Man Friday" disappear on the occasion of their first visit to the place.
Patiently, over and over again, Mr. Hooley had the principal characters try the scene. Below, Wonota, as the heroine, was to run into the camera field at a certain point in the struggle of the two men on the lip of rock. To time the Indian girl's entrance was no small task. But at last the characters seemed to be about letter perfect.
"Look out now! We're going to shoot it!" shouted Jim Hooley through his megaphone. "Miss Fielding! Keep your eye on Onehorse. Keep him up to the mark while he waits for Mr. Grand's speech. Now! Ready?"
It was at just this moment that Ruth felt something—something hard and painful—pressing between her shoulder-blades. She shot a glance over her shoulder to see the ugly face of Dakota Joe Fenbrook peering out at her between the walls of a narrow crack in the face of the cliff. The thing he pressed against her was a long stick, and, with a grin of menace, he drove that stick more firmly against Ruth's body!
"Ready? Camera! Go!" shouted Mr. Hooley, and the scene was on.
Ruth, with a stifled cry, realized that she was being pushed to the edge of the steep path. There was a drop of twenty feet and more, and where she stood there was no net to break the fall!
If Fenbrook pushed her over the brink of the path Ruth knew very well that the outcome would be even too realistic for a moving picture.
Ruth Fielding might have cried out. But at that moment the attention of everyone was so given to the taking of the important scene that perhaps nobody would have understood her cry—what it meant.
Behind her Dakota Joe stretched forward, pushing the stick into the small of her back and urging her closer to the brink. The spot on which she stood was so narrow that it was impossible for her to escape without turning her body, and the bad man knew very well that the pressure of the stick kept her from doing that very thing!
The cameras were being cranked steadily, and Mr. Hooley shouted his orders as needed. Fortunately for the success of the scene, Onehorse did not need the admonitions of Ruth to "keep in the picture." The point came where he made his leap for the shoulders of the white man, and it was timed exactly. The two came to the brink of the rock in perfect accord with the appearance of Wonota on the ground below.
The Indian girl came, gun in hand, as though just from the chase. As she ran into the field of the camera Hooley shouted his advice and she obeyed his words to the letter. Until——
She raised her eyes, quite as she was told. But she looked beyond Grand and Onehorse struggling on the rock. It was to another figure she looked—that of Ruth being forced over the verge of the narrow path.
The girl of the Red Mill was half crouched, striving to push back against the thrust of the stick in Dakota Joe's hands. The upper part of Fenbrook's body was plainly visible from Wonota's station at the foot of the cliff, and his wicked face could be mistaken for no other.
"Now! The gun!" shouted Mr. Hooley. "Wonota! Come alive!"
The Indian girl obeyed—as far as springing into action went. The gun she held went to her shoulder, but its muzzle did not point at the actors above her. Instead, the threatening weapon pointed directly at the head of the villain who was forcing Ruth off her insecure footing on the narrow path.
"What are you doing, Wonota? Wonota!" shouted Mr. Hooley, who could not see Ruth at all.
The Indian girl made no reply. She drew bead upon the head of Dakota Joe, and his glaring eyes were transfixed by the appearance of the gaping muzzle of Wonota's gun.
He dropped the stick with which he had forced Ruth to the edge of the path. She fell sideways, dizzy and faint, clinging to the rough rock with both hands. As it was, she came near rolling over the declivity after all.
But it was Dakota Joe, in his sudden panic, who came to disaster. He had always been afraid of Wonota. She was a dead shot, and he believed that she would not shrink from killing him.
Now it appeared that the Indian girl held his life in her hands. The muzzle of her weapon looked to Dakota Joe at that moment as big as the mouth of a cannon!
He could see her brown finger curled upon the trigger. Each split second threatened the discharge of the gun.
With a stifled cry he tried to leap out of the crack and along the path down which he had come so secretly. But he stumbled. His riding boots were not fit for climbing on such a rugged shelf. Stumbling again, he threw out one hand to find nothing more stable to clutch than the empty air!
"Wonota!" shouted Hooley again. "Stop!" He raised his hand, stopping the cameras.
And at that moment there hurtled over the edge of the path a figure that, whirling and screaming, fell all the distance to the bottom of the canyon. Helen and Jennie, for a breathless instant, thought it must be Ruth, for they knew where she had been hidden. But the voice that roared fear and imprecations was not at all like Ruth Fielding's!
"Who's that?" shouted Mr. Hammond, likewise excited. "He's spoiled that shot, I am sure."
Ruth sat up on the shelf and looked over.
"Oh!" she cried. "Is he killed?"
"He ought to be, if he isn't," growled Mr. Hooley. "What did you do that for, Wonota?"
The Indian girl advanced upon the man writhing on the ground. Dakota Joe saw her coming and set up another frightened yell.
"Don't let her shoot me! Don't let her!" he begged.
"Shut up!" commanded Mr. Hammond. "The gun only has blanks in it. We don't use loaded cartridges in this business. Why! hanged if it isn't Fenbrook."
"Now you have busted me up!" groaned the ex-showman. "I got a broken leg. And I believe my arm's broken too. And that gal done it."
As Jennie said later, however, he could scarcely "get away with that." Ruth came down and told what the rascal had tried to do to her. For a little while it looked as though some of the rougher fellows might do the dastardly Joe bodily harm other than that caused by his fall. But Mr. Hammond hurried him in a motor-car to Clearwater, and there, before the moving picture company returned, he was tried and sent to the State penitentiary.
The great scene had to be taken over again—a costly and nerve-racking experience. Like Ruth herself, Helen and Jennie were glad now when the work was finished and they could head for the railroad.
"Guess you were right, Ruthie," agreed Jennie. "Something did happen. As Aunt Alvirah would have said, you must have felt it in your bones."
"I feel it in my body, anyway," admitted Ruth. "I got dreadfully bruised when I fell on that path. My side is all black and blue."
The misadventures of the occasion were soon forgotten however, especially when the girls reached Clearwater and found a box waiting for them at the express office. Unsuspicious Wonota was called into the stateroom in the special car, and there her white friends displayed to her delighted gaze the "trousseau," as Jennie insisted upon calling the pretty frock and other articles sent on by Madame Joné.
"For me?" asked Wonota, for once showing every indication of delight without being ordered to do so by the director. "All for me? Oh, it is too much! How my father, Chief Totantora, would stare could he see me in those beautiful things. Wonota's white sisters are doing too much for her. There is no way by which she can repay their kindness."
"Say!" said Jennie bluntly, "if you want to pay Ruth Fielding, you just go ahead and become a real movie star—a real Indian star, Wonota. I can see well enough that then she will get big returns on her investment. And in any case, we are all delighted that you are pleased with our present."