“I wish I’d lived away Down East,
Where codfish salt the sea,
And where the folks have apple sass
And punkin pie fer tea!”
“That’s the ‘Western Girl's Lament,’” pursued Mercy. “So you found ’way down East nothing like what you thought it was?”
The castaway scowled at the sharp-tongued lame girl for a moment. Then she nodded. “It’s the folks,” she said. “You’re all so afraid of a stranger. Do I look like I’d bite?”
“Maybe not ordinarily,” said Helen, laughing softly. “But you do not look very pleasant just now.”
“Well, people haven’t been nice to me,” grumbled the Western girl. “I thought there were lots of rich men in the East, and that a girl could make friends ’most anywhere, and get into nice families––”
“To work?” asked Ruth, curiously.
“No, no! You know, you read a lot about rich folks taking up girls and doing everything for them–dressing them fine, and sending them to fancy schools, and all that.”
“I never read of any such thing in my life!” declared Mary Cox. “I guess you’ve been reading funny books.”
“Huh!” sniffed the castaway, who was evidently a runaway and was not made sorry for her escapade even by being wrecked at sea. “Huh! I like a story with some life in it, I do! Jib Pottoway had some dandy paper-covered novels in his locker and he let me read ’em––”
“Who under the sun is Jib Pottoway?” gasped Helen. “That isn’t a real name; is it?”
“It’s ugly enough to be real; isn’t it?” retorted the strange girl, chuckling. “Yep. That’s Jib’s real name. ‘Jibbeway Pottoway’–that’s the whole of it.”
“Oh, oh!” cried Heavy, with her hand to her face. “It makes my jaw ache to even try to say it.”
“What is he?” asked Madge, curiously.
“Injun,” returned the Western girl, laconically. “Or, part Injun. He comes from ’way up Canada way. His folks had Jibbeway blood.”
“But who is he?” queried Ruth, curiously.
“Why, he’s a puncher that works for––Well, he’s a cow puncher. That’s ’nuff. It don’t matter where he works,” added the girl, gruffly.
“That might give away where you come from, eh?” put in Mercy.
“It might,” and Nita laughed.
“But what is your name?” asked Ruth.
“Nita, I tell you.”
“Nita what?”
“Never mind. Just Nita. Mebbe I never had another name. Isn’t one name at a time sufficient, Miss?”
“I don’t believe that is your really-truly name,” said Ruth, gravely.
“I bet you’re right, Ruth Fielding!” cried Heavy, chuckling. “‘Nita’ and ‘Jib Pottoway’ don’t seem to go together. ‘Nita’ is altogether too fancy.”
“It’s a nice name!” exclaimed the strange girl, in some anger. “It was the name of the girl in the paper-covered novel–and it’s good enough for me.”
“But what’s your real name?” urged Ruth.
“I’m not telling you that,” replied the runaway, shortly.
“Then you prefer to go under a false name–even among your friends?” asked the girl from the Red Mill.
“How do I know you’re my friends?” demanded Nita, promptly.
“We can’t very well be your enemies,” said Helen, in some disgust.
“I don’t know. Anybody’s my enemy who wants to send me back–well, anyone who wants to return me to the place I came from.”
“Was it an institution?” asked Mary Cox quickly.
“What’s that?” demanded Nita, puzzled. “What do you mean by an ‘institution’?”
“She means a sort of school,” explained Ruth.
“Yes!” exclaimed The Fox, sharply. “A reform school, or something of the kind. Maybe an almshouse.”
“Never heard of ’em,” returned Nita, unruffled by the insinuation. “Guess they don’t have ’em where I come from. Did you go to one, Miss?”
Heavy giggled, and Madge Steele rapped The Fox smartly on the shoulder. “There!” said the senior. “It serves you right, Mary Cox. You’re answered.”
“Now, I tell you what it is!” cried the strange girl, sitting up in bed again and looking rather flushed, “if you girls are going to nag me, and bother me about who I am, and where I come from, and what my name is–though Nita’s a good enough name for anybody––”
“Anybody but Jib Pottoway,” chuckled Heavy.
“Well! and he warn’t so bad, if he was half Injun,” snapped the runaway. “Well, anyway, if you don’t leave me alone I’ll get out of bed right now and walk out of here. I guess you haven’t any hold on me.”
“Better wait till your clothes are dry,” suggested Madge.
“Aunt Kate would never let you go,” said Heavy.
“I’ll go to-morrow morning, then!” cried the runaway.
“Why, we don’t mean to nag you,” interposed Ruth, soothingly. “But of course we’re curious–and interested.”
“You’re like all the other Eastern folk I’ve met,” declared Nita. “And I don’t like you much. I thought you were different.”
“You’ve been expecting some rich man to adopt you, and dress you in lovely clothes, and all that, eh?” said Mercy Curtis.
“Well! I guess there are not so many millionaires in the East as they said there was,” grumbled Nita.
“Or else they’ve already got girls of their own to look after,” laughed Ruth. “Why, Helen here, has a father who is very rich. But you couldn’t expect him to give up Helen and Tom and take you into his home instead, could you?”
Nita glanced at the dry-goods merchant’s daughter with more interest for a moment.
“And Heavy’s father is awfully rich, too,” said Ruth. “But he’s got Heavy to support––”
“And that’s some job,” broke in Madge, laughing. “Two such daughters as Heavy would make poor dear Papa Stone a pauper!”
“Well,” said Nita, again, “I’ve talked enough. I won’t tell you where I come from. And Nita is my name–now!”
“It is getting late,” said Ruth, mildly. “Don’t you all think it would be a good plan to go to bed? The wind’s gone down some. I guess we can sleep.”
“Good advice,” agreed Madge Steele. “The boys have been abed some time. To-morrow is another day.”
Heavy and she and Mary went off to their room. The others made ready for bed, and the runaway did not say another word to them, but turned her face to the wall and appeared, at least, to be soon asleep.
Ruth crept in beside her so as not to disturb their strange guest. She was a new type of girl to Ruth–and to the others. Her independence of speech, her rough and ready ways, and her evident lack of the influence of companionship with refined girls were marked in this Nita’s character.
Ruth wondered much what manner of home she could have come from, why she had run away from it, and what Nita really proposed doing so far from home and friends. These queries kept the girl from the Red Mill awake for a long time–added to which was the excitement of the evening, which was not calculated to induce sleep.
She would have dropped off some time after the other girls, however, had she not suddenly heard a door latch somewhere on this upper floor, and then the creep, creep, creeping of a rustling step in the hall. It continued so long that Ruth wondered if one of the girls in the other room was ill, and she softly arose and went to the door, which was ajar. And what she saw there in the hall startled her.
The stair-well was a wide and long opening and around it ran a broad balustrade. There was no stairway to the third floor of this big bungalow, only the servants’ staircase in the rear reaching those rooms directly under the roof. So the hall on this second floor, out of which the family bedrooms opened, was an L-shaped room, with the balustrade on one hand.
And upon that balustrade Ruth Fielding beheld a tottering figure in white, plainly visible in the soft glow of the single light burning below, yet rather ghostly after all.
She might have been startled in good earnest had she not first of all recognized Isadore Phelps’ face. He was balancing himself upon the balustrade and, as she came to the door, he walked gingerly along the narrow strip of moulding toward Ruth.
“Izzy! whatever are you doing?” she hissed.
The boy never said a word to her, but kept right on, balancing himself with difficulty. He was in his pajamas, his feet bare, and–she saw it at last–his eyes tight shut.
“Oh! he’s asleep,” murmured Ruth.
And that surely was Busy Izzy’s state at that moment. Sound asleep and “tight-rope walking” on the balustrade.
Ruth knew that it would be dangerous to awaken him suddenly–especially as it might cause him to fall down the stair-well. She crept back into her room and called Helen. The two girls in their wrappers and slippers went into the hall again. There was Busy Izzy tottering along in the other direction, having turned at the wall. Once they thought he would plunge down the stairway, and Helen grabbed at Ruth with a squeal of terror.
“Sh!” whispered her chum. “Go tell Tom. Wake him up. The boys ought to tie Izzy in bed if he is in the habit of doing this.”
“My! isn’t he a sight!” giggled Helen, as she ran past the gyrating youngster, who had again turned for a third perambulation of the railing.
She whispered Tom’s name at his open door and in a minute the girls heard him bound out of bed. He was with them–sleepy-eyed and hastily wrapping his robe about him–in a moment.
“For the land’s sake!” he gasped, when he saw his friend on the balustrade. “What are you––”
“Sh!” commanded Ruth. “He’s asleep.”
Tom took in the situation at a glance. Madge Steele peered out of her door at that moment. “Who is it–Bobbins?” she asked.
“No. It’s Izzy. He’s walking in his sleep,” said Ruth.
“He’s a regular somnambulist,” exclaimed Helen.
“Never mind. Don’t call him names. He can’t help it,” said Madge.
Helen giggled again. Tom had darted back to rouse his chum. Bob Steele appeared, more tousled and more sleepy-looking than Tom.
“What’s the matter with that fellow now?” he grumbled. “He’s like a flea–you never know where he’s going to be next! Ha! he’ll fall off that and break his silly neck.”
And as Busy Izzy was just then nearest his end of the hall in his strange gyrations, Bob Steele stepped forward and grabbed him, lifting him bodily off the balustrade. Busy Izzy screeched, but Tom clapped a hand over his mouth.
“Shut up! want to raise the whole neighborhood?” grunted Bobbins, dragging the lightly attired, struggling boy back into their room. “Ha! I’ll fix you after this. I’ll lash you to the bedpost every night we’re here–now mark that, young man!”
It seemed that the youngster often walked in his sleep, but the girls had not known it. Usually, at school, his roommates kept the dormitory door locked and the key hidden, so that he couldn’t get out to do himself any damage running around with his eyes shut.
The party all got to sleep again after that and there was no further disturbance before morning. They made a good deal of fun of Isadore at the breakfast table, but he took the joking philosophically. He was always playing pranks himself; but he had learned to take a joke, too.
He declared that all he dreamed during the night was that he was wrecked in an iceboat on Second Reef and that the only way for him to get ashore was to walk on a cable stretched from the wreck to the beach. He had probably been walking that cable–in his mind–when Ruth had caught him balancing on the balustrade.
The strange girl who persisted in calling herself “Nita” came down to the table in some of Heavy’s garments, which were a world too large for her. Her own had been so shrunk and stained by the sea-water that they would never be fit to put on again. Aunt Kate was very kind to her, but she looked at the runaway oddly, too. Nita had been just as uncommunicative to her as she had been to the girls in the bedroom the night before.
“If you don’t like me, or don’t like my name, I can go away,” she declared to Miss Kate, coolly. “I haven’t got to stay here, you know.”
“But where will you go? what will you do?” demanded that young lady, severely. “You say the captain of the schooner and his wife are nothing to you?”
“I should say not!” exclaimed Nita. “They were nice and kind to me, though.”
“And you can’t go away until you have something decent to wear,” added Heavy’s aunt. “That’s the first thing to ’tend to.”
And although it was a bright and beautiful morning after the gale, and there were a dozen things the girls were all eager to see, they spent the forenoon in trying to make up an outfit for Nita so that she would be presentable. The boys went off with Mr. Stone’s boatkeeper in the motor launch and Mary Cox was quite cross because the other girls would not leave Miss Kate to fix up Nita the best she could, so that they could all accompany the boys. But in the afternoon the buckboard was brought around and they drove to the lighthouse.
Nita, even in her nondescript garments, was really a pretty girl. No awkwardness of apparel could hide the fact that she had nice features and that her body was strong and lithe. She moved about with a freedom that the other girls did not possess. Even Ruth was not so athletic as the strange girl. And yet she seemed to know nothing at all about the games and the exercises which were commonplace to the girls from Briarwood Hall.
There was a patch of wind-blown, stunted trees and bushes covering several acres of the narrowing point, before the driving road along the ridge brought the visitors to Sokennet Light. While they were driving through this a man suddenly bobbed up beside the way and the driver hailed him.
“Hullo, you Crab!” he said. “Found anything ’long shore from that wreck?”
The man stood up straight and the girls thought him a very horrid-looking object. He had a great beard and his hair was dark and long.
“He’s a bad one for looks; ain’t he, Miss?” asked the driver of Ruth, who sat beside him.
“He isn’t very attractive,” she returned.
“Ha! I guess not. And Crab’s as bad as he looks, which is saying a good deal. He comes of the ‘wreckers.’ Before there was a light here, or life saving stations along this coast, there was folks lived along here that made their livin’ out of poor sailors wrecked out there on the reefs. Some said they used to toll vessels onto the rocks with false lights. Anyhow, Crab’s father, and his gran’ther, was wreckers. He’s assistant lightkeeper; but he oughtn’t to be. I don’t see how Mother Purling can get along with him.”
“She isn’t afraid of him; is she?” queried Ruth.
“She isn’t afraid of anything,” said Heavy, quickly, from the rear seat. “You wait till you see her.”
The buckboard went heavily on toward the lighthouse; but the girls saw that the man stood for a long time–as long as they were in sight, at least–staring after them.
“What do you suppose he looked at Nita so hard for?” whispered Helen in Ruth’s ear. “I thought he was going to speak to her.”
But Ruth had not noticed this, nor did the runaway girl seem to have given the man any particular attention.
They came to the lighthouse. There was only a tiny, whitewashed cottage at the foot of the tall shaft. It seemed a long way to the brass-trimmed and glistening lantern at the top. Ruth wondered how the gaunt old woman who came to the door to welcome them could ever climb those many, many stairs to the narrow gallery at the top of the shaft. She certainly could not suffer as Aunt Alvirah did with her back and bones.
Sokennet Light was just a steady, bright light, sending its gleam far seaward. There was no mechanism for turning, such as marks the revolving lights in so many lighthouses. The simplicity of everything about Sokennet Light was what probably led the department officials to allow Mother Purling to remain after her husband died in harness.
“Jack Crab has done his cleaning and gone about his business,” said Mother Purling, to the girls. “Ye may all climb up to the lantern if ye wish; but touch nothing.”
Beside the shaft of the light was a huge fog bell. That was rung by clockwork. Mother Purling showed Ruth and her companions how it worked before the girls started up the stairs. Mercy remained in the little house with the good old woman, for she never could have hobbled up those spiral stairs.
“It’s too bad about that girl,” said Nita, brusquely, to Ruth. “Has she always been lame?”
Ruth warmed toward the runaway immediately when she found that Nita was touched by Mercy Curtis’ affliction. She told Nita how the lame girl had once been much worse off than she was now, and all about her being operated on by the great physician.
“She’s so much better off now than she was!” cried Ruth. “And so much happier!”
“But she’s a great nuisance to have along,” snapped Mary Cox, immediately behind them. “She had better stayed at home, I should think.”
Ruth flushed angrily, but before she could speak, Nita said, looking coolly at The Fox:
“You’re a might snappy, snarly sort of a girl; ain’t you? And you think you are dreadfully smart. But somebody told you that. It ain’t so. I’ve seen a whole lot smarter than you. You wouldn’t last long among the boys where I come from.”
“Thank you!” replied Mary, her head in the air. “I wouldn’t care to be liked by the boys. It isn’t ladylike to think of the boys all the time––”
“These are grown men, I mean,” said Nita, coolly. “The punchers that work for–well, just cow punchers. You call them cowboys. They know what’s good and fine, jest as well as Eastern folks. And a girl that talks like you do about a cripple wouldn’t go far with them.”
“I suppose your friend, the half-Indian, is a critic of deportment,” said The Fox, with a laugh.
“Well, Jib wouldn’t say anything mean about a cripple,” said Nita, in her slow way, and The Fox seemed to have no reply.
But this little by-play drew Ruth Fielding closer to the queer girl who had selected her “hifaluting” name because it was the name of a girl in a paper-covered novel.
Nita had lived out of doors, that was plain. Ruth believed, from what the runaway had said, that she came from the plains of the great West. She had lived on a ranch. Perhaps her folks owned a ranch, and they might even now be searching the land over for their daughter. The thought made the girl from the Red Mill very serious, and she determined to try and gain Nita’s confidence and influence her, if she could, to tell the truth about herself and to go back to her home. She knew that she could get Mr. Cameron to advance Nita’s fare to the West, if the girl would return.
But up on the gallery in front of the shining lantern of the lighthouse there was no chance to talk seriously to the runaway. Heavy had to sit down when she reached this place, and she declared that she puffed like a steam engine. Then, when she had recovered her breath, she pointed out the places of interest to be seen from the tower–the smoke of Westhampton to the north; Fuller’s Island, with its white sands and gleaming green lawns and clumps of wind-blown trees; the long strip of winding coast southward, like a ribbon laid down for the sea to wash, and far, far to the east, over the tumbling waves, still boisterous with the swell of last night’s storm, the white riding sail of the lightship on No Man’s Shoal.
They came down after an hour, wind-blown, the taste of salt on their lips, and delighted with the view. They found the ugly, hairy man sitting on the doorstep, listening with a scowl and a grin to Mercy’s sharp speeches.
“I don’t know what brought you back here to the light, Jack Crab, at this time of day,” said Mother Purling. “You ain’t wanted.”
“I likes to see comp’ny, too, I do,” growled the man.
“Well, these girls ain’t your company,” returned the old woman. “Now! get up and be off. Get out of the way.”
Crab rose, surlily enough, but his sharp eyes sought Nita. He looked her all over, as though she were some strange object that he had never seen before.
“So you air the gal they brought ashore off the lumber schooner last night?” he asked her.
“Yes, I am,” she returned, flatly.
“You ain’t got no folks around here; hev ye?” he continued.
“No, I haven’t.”
“What’s your name?”
“Puddin’ Tame!” retorted Mercy, breaking in, in her shrill way. “And she lives in the lane, and her number’s cucumber! There now! do you know all you want to know, Hardshell?”
Crab growled something under his breath and went off in a hangdog way.
“That’s a bad man,” said Mercy, with confidence. “And he’s much interested in you, Miss Nita Anonymous. Do you know why?”
“I’m sure I don’t,” replied Nita, laughing quite as sharply as before, but helping the lame girl to the buckboard with kindliness.
“You look out for him, then,” said Mercy, warningly. “He’s a hardshell crab, all right. And either he thinks he knows you, or he’s got something in his mind that don’t mean good to you.”
But only Ruth heard this. The others were bidding Mother Purling good-bye.
The boys had returned when the party drove back to the bungalow from the lighthouse. A lighthouse might be interesting, and it was fine to see twenty-odd miles to the No Man’s Shoal, and Mother Purling might be a dear–but the girls hadn’t done anything, and the boys had. They had fished for halibut and had caught a sixty-five-pound one. Bobbins had got it on his hook; but it took all three of them, with the boatkeeper’s advice, to get the big, flapping fish over the side.
They had part of that fish for supper. Heavy was enraptured, and the other girls had a saltwater appetite that made them enjoy the fish, too. It was decided to try for blackfish off the rocks beyond Sokennet the next morning.
“We’ll go over in the Miraflame”–(that was the name of the motor boat)–“and we’ll take somebody with us to help Phineas,” Heavy declared. Phineas was the boatman who had charge of Mr. Stone’s little fleet. “Phin is a great cook and he’ll get us up a regular fish dinner––”
“Oh, dear, Jennie Stone! how can you?” broke in Helen, with her hands clasped.
“How can I what, Miss?” demanded the stout girl, scenting trouble.
“How can you, when we are eating such a perfect dinner as this, be contemplating any other future occasion when we possibly shall be hungry?”
The others laughed, but Heavy looked at her school friends with growing contempt. “You talk–you talk,” she stammered, “well! you don’t talk English–that I’m sure of! And you needn’t put it all on me. You all eat with good appetites. And you’d better thank me, not quarrel with me. If I didn’t think of getting nice things to eat, you’d miss a lot, now I tell you. You don’t know how I went out in Mammy Laura’s kitchen this very morning, before most of you had your hair out of curl-papers, and just slaved to plan the meals for to-day.”
“Hear! hear!” chorused the boys, drumming with their knife handles on the table. “We’re for Jennie! She’s all right.”
“See!” flashed in Mercy, with a gesture. “Miss Stone has won the masculine portion of the community by the only unerring way–the only straight path to the heart of a boy is through his stomach.”
“I guess we can all thank Jennie,” said Ruth, laughing quietly, “for her attention to our appetites. But I fear if she had expected to fast herself to-day she’d still be abed!”
They were all lively at dinner, and they spent a lively evening, towards the end of which Bob Steele gravely went out of doors and brought in an old boat anchor, or kedge, weighing so many pounds that even he could scarcely carry it upstairs to the bed chamber which he shared with Tom and Isadore.
“What are you going to do with that thing, Bobby Steele?” demanded his sister.
“Going to anchor Busy Izzy to it with a rope. I bet he won’t walk far in his sleep to-night,” declared Bobbins.
With the fishing trip in their minds, all were astir early the next morning. Miss Kate had agreed to go with them, for Mercy believed that she could stand the trip, as the sea was again calm. She could remain in the cabin of the motor boat while the others were fishing off the rocks for tautog and rock-bass. The boys all had poles; but the girls said they would be content to cast their lines from the rock and hope for nibbles from the elusive blackfish.
The Miraflame was a roomy craft and well furnished. When they started at nine o’clock the party numbered eleven, besides the boatman and his assistant. To the surprise of Ruth–and it was remarked in whispers by the other girls, too–Phineas, the boatkeeper, had chosen Jack Crab to assist him in the management of the motor boat.
“Jack doesn’t have to be at the light till dark. The old lady gets along all right alone,” explained Phineas. “And it ain’t many of these longshoremen who know how to handle a motor. Jack’s used to machinery.”
He seemed to feel that it was necessary to excuse himself for hiring the hairy man. But Heavy only said:
“Well, as long as he behaves himself I don’t care. But I didn’t suppose you liked the fellow, Phin.”
“I don’t. It was Hobson’s choice, Miss,” returned the sailor.
Phineas, the girls found, was a very pleasant and entertaining man. And he knew all about fishing. He had supplied the bait for tautog, and the girls and boys of the party, all having lived inland, learned many things that they hadn’t known before.
“Look at this!” cried Madge Steele, the first to discover a miracle. “He says this bait for tautog is scallops! Now, that quivering, jelly-like body is never a scallop. Why, a scallop is a firm, white lump––”
“It’s a mussel,” said Heavy, laughing.
“It’s only the ‘eye’ of the scallop you eat, Miss,” explained Phineas.
“Now I know just as much as I did before,” declared Madge. “So I eat a scallop’s eye, do I? We had them for breakfast this very morning–with bacon.”
“So you did, Miss. I raked ’em up myself yesterday afternoon,” explained Phineas. “You eat the ‘eye,’ but these are the bodies, and they are the reg’lar natural food of the tautog, or blackfish.”
“The edible part of the scallop is that muscle which adheres to the shell–just like the muscle that holds the clam to its shell,” said Heavy, who, having spent several summers at the shore, was better informed than her friends.
Phineas showed the girls how to bait their hooks with the soft bodies of the scallop, warning them to cover the point of the hooks well, and to pull quickly if they felt the least nibble.
“The tautog is a small-mouthed fish–smaller, even, than the bass the boys are going to cast for. So, when he touches the hook at all, you want to grab him.”
“Does it hurt the fish to be caught?” asked Helen, curiously.
Phineas grinned. “I never axed ’em, ma’am,” he said.
The Miraflame carried them swiftly down the cove, or harbor, of Sokennet and out past the light. The sea was comparatively calm, but the surf roared against the rocks which hedged in the sand dunes north of the harbor’s mouth. It was in this direction that Phineas steered the launch, and for ten miles the craft spun along at a pace that delighted the whole party.
“We’re just skimming the water!” cried Tom Cameron. “Oh, Nell! I’m going to coax father till he buys one for us to use on the Lumano.”
“I’ll help tease,” agreed his twin, her eyes sparkling.
Nita, the runaway, looked from brother to sister with sudden interest. “Does your father give you everything you ask him for?” she demanded.
“Not much!” cried Tom. “But dear old dad is pretty easy with us and–Mrs. Murchiston says–gives in to us too much.”
“But, does he buy you such things as boats–right out–for you just to play with?”
“Why, of course!” cried Tom.
“And I couldn’t even have a piano,” muttered Nita, turning away with a shrug. “I told him he was a mean old hunks!”
“Whom did you say that to?” asked Ruth, quietly.
“Never you mind!” returned Nita, angrily. “But that’s what he is.”
Ruth treasured these observations of the runaway. She was piecing them together, and although as yet it was a very patched bit of work, she was slowly getting a better idea of who Nita was and her home surroundings.
Finally the Miraflame ran in between a sheltering arm of rock and the mainland. The sea was very still in here, the heave and surge of the water only murmuring among the rocks. There was an old fishing dock at which the motor boat was moored. Then everybody went ashore and Phineas and Jack Crab pointed out the best fishing places along the rocks.
These were very rugged ledges, and the water sucked in among them, and hissed, and chuckled, and made all sorts of gurgling sounds while the tide rose. There were small caves and little coves and all manner of odd hiding places in the rocks.
But the girls and boys were too much interested in the proposed fishing to bother about anything else just then. Phineas placed Ruth on the side of a round-topped boulder, where she stood on a very narrow ledge, with a deep green pool at her feet. She was hidden from the other fishers–even from the boys, who clambered around to the tiny cape that sheltered the basin into which the motor boat had been run, and from the point of which they expected to cast for bass.
“Now, Miss,” said the boatkeeper, “down at the bottom of this still pool Mr. Tautog is feeding on the rocks. Drop your baited hook down gently to him. And if he nibbles, pull sharply at first, and then, with a stead, hand-over-hand motion, draw him in.”
Ruth was quite excited; but once she saw Nita and the man, Crab, walking farther along the rocks, and Ruth wondered that the fellow was so attentive to the runaway. But this was merely a passing thought. Her mind returned to the line she watched.
She pulled it up after a long while; the hook was bare. Either Mr. Tautog had been very, very careful when he nibbled the bait, or the said bait had slipped off. It was not easy to make the jelly-like body of the scallop remain on the hook. But Ruth was as anxious to catch a fish as the other girls, and she had watched Phineas with sharp and eager eyes when he baited the hook.
Ruth dropped it over the edge of the rock again after a minute. It sank down, down, down––Was that a nibble? She felt the faintest sort of a jerk on the line. Surely something was at the bait!
Again the jerk. Ruth returned the compliment by giving the line a prompt tug. Instantly she knew that she had hooked him!
“Oh! oh! oh!” she gasped, in a rising scale of delight and excitement.
She pulled in on the line. The fish was heavy, and he tried to pull his way, too. The blackfish is not much of a fighter, but he can sag back and do his obstinate best to remain in the water when the fisher is determined to get him out.
This fellow weighed two pounds and a half and was well hooked. Ruth, her cheeks glowing, her eyes dancing, hauled in, and in, and in––There he came out of the water, a plump, glistening body, that flapped and floundered in the air, and on the ledge at her feet. She desired mightily to cry out; but Phineas had warned them all to be still while they fished. Their voices might scare all the fish away.
She unhooked it beautifully, seizing it firmly in the gills. Phineas had shown her where to lay any she might catch in a little cradle in the rock behind her. It was a damp little hollow, and Mr. Tautog could not flop out into the sea again.
Oh! it was fun to bait the hook once more with trembling fingers, and heave the weighted line over the edge of the narrow ledge on which she stood. There might be another–perhaps even a bigger one–waiting down there to seize upon the bait.
And just then Mary Cox, her hair tousled and a distressfully discontented expression on her face, came around the corner of the big boulder.
“Oh! Hullo!” she said, discourteously. “You here?”
“Sh!” whispered Ruth, intent on the line and the pool of green water.
“What’s the matter with you?” snapped The Fox. “Don’t say you’ve got a bite! I’m sick of hearing them say it over there––”
“I’ve caught one,” said Ruth, with pride, pointing to the glistening tautog lying on the rock.
“Oh! Of course, ’twould be you who got it,” snarled Mary. “I bet he gave you the best place.”
“Please keep still!” begged Ruth. “I believe I’ve got another bite.”
“Have a dozen for all I care,” returned Mary. “I want to get past you.”
“Wait! I feel a nibble––”
But Mary pushed rudely by. She took the inside of the path, of course. The ledge was very narrow, and Ruth was stooping over the deep pool, breathlessly watching the line.
With a half-stifled scream Ruth fell forward, flinging out both hands. Mary clutched at her–she did try to save her. But she was not quick enough. Ruth dropped like a plummet and the green water closed over her with scarcely a splash.
Mary did not cry out. She was speechless with fear, and stood with clasped hands, motionless, upon the path.
“She can swim! she can swim!” was the thought that shuttled back and forth in The Fox’s brain.
But moment after moment passed and Ruth did not come to the surface. The pool was as calm as before, save for the vanishing rings that broke against the surrounding rocks. Mary held her breath. She began to feel as though it were a dream, and that her school companion had not really fallen into the pool. It must be an hallucination, for Ruth did not come to the surface again!
The three boys were on the other side of the narrow inlet where the Miraflame lay. Phineas had told them that bass were more likely to be found upon the ocean side; therefore they were completely out of sight.
The last Tom, Bob and Isadora saw of the girls, the fishermen were placing them along the rocky path, and Mercy was lying in a deck chair on the deck of the launch, fluttering a handkerchief at them as they went around the end of the reef.
“I bet they don’t get a fish,” giggled Isadore. “And even Miss Kate’s got a line! What do girls know about fishing?”
“If there’s any tautog over there, I bet Helen and Ruth get ’em. They’re all right in any game,” declared the loyal Tom.
“Madge will squeal and want somebody to take the fish off her hook, if she does catch one,” grinned Bob. “She puts on lots of airs because she’s the oldest; but she’s a regular ‘scare-cat,’ after all.”
“Helen and Ruth are good fellows,” returned Tom, with emphasis. “They’re quite as good fun as the ordinary boy–of course, not you, Bobbins, or Busy Izzy here; but they are all right.”
“What do you think of that Nita girl?” asked Busy Izzy, suddenly.
“I believe there’s something to her,” declared Bob, with conviction. “She ain’t afraid of a living thing, I bet!”
“There is something queer about her,” Tom added, thoughtfully. “Have you noticed how that Crab fellow looks at her?”
“I see he hangs about her a good bit,” said Isadore, quickly. “Why, do you suppose?”
“That’s what I’d like to know,” returned Tom Cameron.
They were now where Phineas had told them bass might be caught, and gave their attention to their tackle. All three boys had fished for perch, pike, and other gamey fresh-water fish; but this was their first casting with a rod into salt water.
“A true disciple of Izaak Walton should be dumb,” declared Tom, warningly eyeing Isadore.
“Isn’t he allowed any leeway at all–not even when he lands a fish?” demanded the irrepressible.
“Not above a whisper,” grunted Bob Steele, trying to bait his hook with his thumb instead of the bait provided by Phineas. “Jingo!”
“Old Bobbins has got the first bite,” chuckled Tom, under his breath, as he made his cast.
The reel whirred and the hook fell with a light splash into a little eddy where the water seemed to swirl about a sunken rock.
“You won’t catch anything there,” said Isadore.
“I’ll gag you if you don’t shut up,” promised Tom.
Suddenly his line straightened out. The hook seemed to be sucked right down into a hole between the rocks, and the reel began to whir. It stopped and Tom tried it.
“Pshaw! that ain’t a bite,” whispered Isadore.
At Tom’s first attempt to reel in, the fish that had seized his hook started–for Spain! At least, it shot seaward, and the boy knew that Spain was about the nearest dry land if the fish kept on in that direction.
“A strike!” Tom gasped and let his reel sing for a moment or two. Then, when the drag of the line began to tell on the bass, he carefully wound in some of it. The fish turned and finally ran toward the rocks once more. Then Tom wound up as fast as he could, trying to keep the line taut.
“He’ll tangle you all up, Tommy,” declared Bob, unable, like Isadore, to keep entirely still.
Tom was flushed and excited, but said never a word. He played the big bass with coolness after all, and finally tired it out, keeping it clear of the tangles of weed down under the rock, and drew it forth–a plump, flopping, gasping victim.
Bob and Isadore were then eager to do as well and began whipping the water about the rocks with more energy than skill. Tom, delighted with his first kill, ran over the rocks with the fish to show it to the girls. As he surmounted the ridge of the rocky cape he suddenly saw Nita, the runaway, and Jack Crab, in a little cove right below him. The girl and the fisherman had come around to this side of the inlet, away from Phineas and the other girls.
They did not see Tom behind and above them. Nita was not fishing, and Crab had unfolded a paper and was showing it to her. At this distance the paper seemed like a page torn from some newspaper, and there were illustrations as well as reading text upon the sheet which Crab held before the strange girl’s eyes.
“There it is!” Tom heard the lighthouse keeper’s assistant say, in an exultant tone. “You know what I could get if I wanted to show this to the right parties. Now, what d’ye think of it, Sissy?”
What Nita thought, or what she said, Tom did not hear. Indeed, scarcely had the two come into his line of vision, and he heard these words, when something much farther away–across the inlet, in fact–caught the boy’s attention.
He could see his sister and some of the other girls fishing from the rocky path; but directly opposite where he stood was Ruth. He saw Mary Cox meet and speak with her, the slight struggle of the two girls for position on the narrow ledge, and Ruth’s plunge into the water.
“Oh, by George!” shouted Tom, as Ruth went under, and he dropped the flopping bass and went down the rocks at a pace which endangered both life and limb. His shout startled Nita and Jack Crab. But they had not seen Ruth fall, nor did they understand Tom’s great excitement.
The inlet was scarcely more than a hundred yards across; but it was a long way around to the spot where Ruth had fallen, or been pushed, from the rock. Tom never thought of going the long way to the place. He tore off his coat, kicked off his canvas shoes, and, reaching the edge of the water, dived in head first without a word of explanation to the man and girl beside him.
He dived slantingly, and swam under water for a long way. When he came up he was a quarter of the distance across the inlet. He shook the water from his eyes, threw himself breast high out of the sea, and shouted:
“Has she come up? I don’t see her!”
Nobody but Mary Cox knew what he meant. Helen and the other girls were screaming because they had seen Tom fling himself into the sea but they had not seen Ruth fall in.
Nor did Mary Cox find voice enough to tell them when they ran along the ledge to try and see what Tom was swimming for. The Fox stood with glaring eyes, trying to see into the deep pool. But the pool remain unruffled and Ruth did not rise to the surface.
“Has she come up?” again shouted Tom, rising as high as he could in the water, and swimming with an overhand stroke.
There seemed nobody to answer him; they did not know what he meant. The boy shot through the water like a fish. Coming near the rock, he rose up with a sudden muscular effort, then dived deep. The green water closed over him and, when Helen and the others reached the spot where Mary Cox stood, wringing her hands and moaning, Tom had disappeared as utterly as Ruth herself.
“What has happened?”
“Where’s Ruth?”
“Mary Cox! why don’t you answer?”
The Fox for once in her career was stunned. She could only shake her head and wring her hands. Helen was the first of the other girls to suspect the trouble, and she cried:
“Ruth’s overboard! That’s the reason Tom has gone in. Oh, oh! why don’t they come up again?”
And almost immediately all the others saw the importance of that question. Ruth Fielding had been down fully a minute and a half now, and Tom had not come up once for air.
Nita had set off running around the head of the inlet, and Crab shuffled along in her wake. The strange girl ran like a goat over the rocks.
Phineas, who had been aboard the motor boat and busy with his famous culinary operations, now came lumbering up to the spot. He listened to a chorused explanation of the situation–tragic indeed in its appearance. Phineas looked up and down the rocky path, and across the inlet, and seemed to swiftly take a marine “observation.” Then he snorted.
“They’re all right!” he exclaimed.
“What?” shrieked Helen.
“All right?” repeated Heavy. “Why, Phineas––”
She broke off with a startled gurgle. Phineas turned quickly, too, and looked over the high boulder. There appeared the head of Ruth Fielding and, in a moment, the head of Tom Cameron beside it.
“You both was swept through the tunnel into the pool behind, sir,” said Phineas, wagging his head.
“Oh, I was never so scared in my life,” murmured Ruth, clambering down to the path, the water running from her clothing in little streams.
“Me, too!” grunted Tom, panting. “The tide sets in through that hole awfully strong.”
“I might have told you about it,” grunted Phineas; “but I didn’t suppose airy one of ye was going for to jump into the sea right here.”
“We didn’t–intentionally,” declared Ruth.
“How ever did it happen, Ruthie?” demanded Heavy.
There was a moment’s silence. Tom grew red in the face, but he kept his gaze turned from Mary Cox. Ruth answered calmly enough:
“It was my own fault. Mary was just coming along to pass me. I had a bite. Between trying to let her by and ‘tending my fish,’ I fell in–and now I have lost fish, line, and all.”
“Be thankful you did not lose your life, Miss Fielding,” said Aunt Kate. “Come right down to the boat and get those wet things off. You, too, Tom.”
At that moment Nita came to the spot. “Is she safe? Is she safe?” she cried.
“Don’t I look so?” returned Ruth, laughing gaily. “And here’s the fish I did catch. I mustn’t lose him.”
Nita stepped close to the girl from the Red Mill and tugged at her wet sleeve.
“What are you going to do to her?” she whispered.
“Do to who?”
“That girl.”
“What are you talking about?” demanded Ruth.
“I saw her,” said Nita. “I saw her push you. She ought to be thrown into the water herself.”
“Hush!” commanded Ruth. “You’re mistaken. You didn’t see straight, my dear.”
“Yes, I did,” declared the Western girl, firmly. “She’s been mean to you, right along. I’ve noticed it. She threw you in.”
“Don’t say such a thing again!” commanded Ruth, warmly. “You have no right.”
“Huh!” said Nita, eyeing her strangely. “It’s your own business, I suppose. But I am not blind.”
“I hope not,” sad Ruth, calmly. “But I hope, too, you will not repeat what you just said–to anyone.”
“Why–if you really don’t want me to,” said Nita, slowly.
“Truly, I don’t wish you to,” said Ruth, earnestly. “I don’t even admit that you are right, mind––”
“Oh, it’s your secret,” said Nita, shortly, and turned away.
And Ruth had a word to say to Tom, too, as they hurried side by side to the boat, he carrying the fish. “Now, Tommy–remember!” she said.
“I won’t be easy in my mind, just the same, while that girl is here,” growled Master Tom.
“That’s foolish. She never meant to do it.”
“Huh! She was scared, of course. But she’s mean enough––”
“Stop! somebody will hear you. And, anyway,” Ruth added, remembering what Nita had said, “it’s my secret.”
“True enough; it is.”
“Then don’t tell it, Tommy,” she added, with a laugh.
But it was hard to meet the sharp eye of Mercy Curtis and keep the secret. “And pray, Miss, why did you have to go into the water after the fish?” Mercy demanded.
“I was afraid he would get away,” laughed Ruth.
“And who helped you do it?” snapped the lame girl.
“Helped me do what?”
“Helped you tumble in.”
“Now, do you suppose I needed help to do so silly a thing as that?” cried Ruth.
“You needed help to do it the other day on the steamboat,” returned Mercy, slily. “And I saw The Fox following you around that way.”
“Why, what nonsense you talk, Mercy Curtis!”
But Ruth wondered if Mercy was to be so easily put off. The lame girl was so very sharp.
However, Ruth was determined to keep her secret. Not a word had she said to Mary Cox. Indeed, she had not looked at her since she climbed out of the open pool behind the boulder and, well-nigh breathless, reached the rock after that perilous plunge. Tom she had sworn to silence, Nita she had warned to be still, and now Mercy’s suspicions were to be routed.
“Poor, poor girl!” muttered Ruth, with more sorrow than anger. “If she is not sorry and afraid yet, how will she feel when she awakes in the night and remembers what might have been?”
Nevertheless, the girl from the Red Mill did not allow her secret to disturb her cheerfulness. She hid any feeling she might have had against The Fox. When they all met at dinner on the Miraflame, she merely laughed and joked about her accident, and passed around dainty bits of the baked tautog that Phineas had prepared especially for her.
That fisherman’s chowder was a marvel, and altogether he proved to be as good a cook as Heavy had declared. The boys had caught several bass, and they caught more after dinner. But those were saved to take home. The girls, however, had had enough fishing. Ruth’s experience frightened them away from the slippery rocks.
Mary Cox was certainly a very strange sort of a girl; but her present attitude did not surprise Ruth. Mary had, soon after Ruth entered Briarwood Hall, taken a dislike to the younger girl. Ruth’s new club–the Sweetbriars–had drawn almost all the new girls in the school, as well as many of Mary’s particular friends; while the Up and Doing Club, of which Mary was the leading spirit, was not alone frowned upon by Mrs. Tellingham and her assistants, but lost members until–as Helen Cameron had said–the last meeting of the Upedes consisted of The Fox and Helen herself.
The former laid all this at Ruth Fielding’s door. She saw Ruth’s influence and her club increase, while her own friends fell away from her. Twice Ruth had helped to save Mary from drowning, and on neither occasion did the older girl seem in the least grateful. Now Ruth was saving her from the scorn of the other girls and–perhaps–a request from Heavy’s Aunt Kate that Mary pack her bag and return home.
Ruth hoped that Mary would find some opportunity of speaking to her alone before the day was over. But, even when the boys returned from the outer rocks with a splendid string of bass, and the bow of the Miraflame was turned homeward, The Fox said never a word to her. Ruth crept away into the bows by herself, her mind much troubled. She feared that the fortnight at Lighthouse Point might become very unpleasant, if Mary continued to be so very disagreeable.
Suddenly somebody tapped her on the arm. The motor boat was pushing toward the mouth of Sokennet Harbor and the sun was well down toward the horizon. The girls were in the cabin, singing, and Madge was trying to make her brother sing, too; but Bob’s voice was changing and what he did to the notes of the familiar tunes was a caution.
But it was Tom Cameron who had come to Ruth. “See here,” said the boy, eagerly. “See what I picked up on the rocks over there.”
“Over where?” asked Ruth, looking curiously at the folded paper in Tom’s hand.
“Across from where you fell in, Ruth. Nita and that Crab fellow were standing there when I went down the rocks and dived in for you. And I saw them looking at this sheet of newspaper,” and Tom began to slowly unfold it as he spoke.
“Whatever have you got there, Tom?” asked Ruth, curiously.
“Hush! I reckon Crab lost it when you fell in the water and stirred us all up so,” returned the boy, with a grin.
“Lost that paper?”
“Yes. You see, it’s a page torn from the Sunday edition of a New York daily. On this side is a story of some professor’s discoveries in ancient Babylon.”
“Couldn’t have interested Jack Crab much,” remarked Ruth, smiling.
“That’s what I said myself,” declared Tom, hastily. “Therefore, I turned it over. And this is what Crab was showing that Nita girl, I am sure.”
Ruth looked at the illustrated sheet that Tom spread before her. There was a girl on a very spirited cow pony, swinging a lariat, the loop of which was about to settle over the broadly spreading horns of a Texas steer. The girl was dressed in a very fancy “cow-girl” costume, and the picture was most spirited indeed. In one corner, too, was a reproduction of a photograph of the girl described in the newspaper article.
“Why! it doesn’t look anything like Nita,” gasped Ruth, understanding immediately why Tom had brought the paper to her.
“Nope. You needn’t expect it to. Those papers use any old photograph to make illustrations from. But read the story.”
It was all about the niece of a very rich cattle man in Montana who had run away from the ranch on which she had lived all her life. It was called Silver Ranch, and was a very noted cattle range in that part of the West. The girl’s uncle raised both horses and cattle, was very wealthy, had given her what attention a single man could in such a situation, and was now having a countrywide search made for the runaway.
“Jane Ann Hicks Has Run Away From a Fortune” was the way the paper put it in a big “scare head” across the top of the page; and the text went on to tell of rough Bill Hicks, of Bullhide, and how he had begun in the early cattle days as a puncher himself and had now risen to the sole proprietorship of Silver Ranch.
“Bill’s one possession besides his cattle and horses that he took any joy in was his younger brother’s daughter, Jane Ann. She is an orphan and came to Bill and he has taken sole care of her (for a woman has never been at Silver Ranch, save Indian squaws and a Mexican cook woman) since she could creep. Jane Ann is certainly the apple of Old Bill’s eye.
“But, as Old Bill has told the Bullhide chief of police, who is sending the pictures and description of the lost girl all over the country, ‘Jane Ann got some powerful hifalutin’ notions.’ She is now a well-grown girl, smart as a whip, pretty, afraid of nothing on four legs, and just as ignorant as a girl brought up in such an environment would be. Jane Ann has been reading novels, perhaps. As the Eastern youth used to fill up on cheap stories of the Far West, and start for that wild and woolly section with the intention of wiping from the face of Nature the last remnant of the Red Tribes, so it may be that Jane Ann Hicks has read of the Eastern millionaire and has started for the Atlantic seaboard for the purpose of lassoing one–or more–of those elusive creatures.
“However, Old Bill wants Jane Ann to come home. Silver Ranch will be hers some day, when Old Bill passes over the Great Divide, and he believes that if she is to be Montana’s coming Cattle Queen his niece would better not know too much about the effete East.”
And in this style the newspaper writer had spread before his readers a semi-humorous account (perhaps fictitious) of the daily life of the missing heiress of Silver Ranch, her rides over the prairies and hills on half-wild ponies, the round-ups, calf-brandings, horse-breakings, and all other activities supposed to be part and parcel of ranch life.
“My goodness me!” gasped Ruth, when she had hastily scanned all this, “do you suppose that any sane girl would have run away from all that for just a foolish whim?”
“Just what I say,” returned Tom. “Cracky! wouldn’t it be great to ride over that range, and help herd the cattle, and trail wild horses, and–and––”
“Well, that’s just what one girl got sick of, it seems,” finished Ruth, her eyes dancing. “Now! whether this same girl is the one we know––”
“I bet she is,” declared Tom.
“Betting isn’t proof, you know,” returned Ruth, demurely.
“No. But Jane Ann Hicks is this young lady who wants to be called ‘Nita’–Oh, glory! what a name!”
“If it is so,” Ruth rejoined, slowly, “I don’t so much wonder that she wanted a fancy name. ‘Jane Ann Hicks’! It sounds ugly; but an ugly name can stand for a truly beautiful character.”
“That fact doesn’t appeal to this runaway girl, I guess,” said Tom. “But the question is: What shall we do about it?”
“I don’t know as we can do anything about it,” Ruth said, slowly. “Of course we don’t know that this Hicks girl and Nita are the same.”
“What was Crab showing her the paper for?”
“What can Crab have to do with it, anyway?” returned Ruth, although she had not forgotten the interest the assistant lighthouse keeper had shown in Nita from the first.
“Don’t know. But if he recognized her––”
“From the picture?” asked Ruth.
“Well! you look at it. That drawing of the girl on horseback looks more like her than the photographic half-tone,” said Tom. “She looks just that wild and harum-scarum!”
Ruth laughed. “There is a resemblance,” she admitted. “But I don’t understand why Crab should have any interest in the girl, anyway.”
“Neither do I. Let’s keep still about it. Of course, we’ll tell Nell,” said Tom. “But nobody else. If that old ranchman is her uncle he ought to be told where she is.”
“Maybe she was not happy with him, after all,” said Ruth, thoughtfully.
“My goodness!” Tom cried, preparing to go back to the other boys who were calling him. “I don’t see how anybody could be unhappy under such conditions.”
“That’s all very well for a boy,” returned the girl, with a superior air. “But think! she had no girls to associate with, and the only women were squaws and a Mexican cook!”
Ruth watched Nita, but did not see the assistant lighthouse keeper speak to the runaway during the passage home, and from the dock to the bungalow Ruth walked by Nita’s side. She was tempted to show the page of the newspaper to the other girl, but hesitated. What if Nita really was Jane Hicks? Ruth asked herself how she would feel if she were burdened with that practical but unromantic name, and had to live on a lonely cattle ranch without a girl to speak to.
“Maybe I’d run away myself,” thought Ruth. “I was almost tempted to run away from Uncle Jabez when I first went to live at the Red Mill.”
She had come to pity the strange girl since reading about the one who had run away from Silver Ranch. Whether Nita had any connection with the newspaper article or not, Ruth had begun to see that there might be situations which a girl couldn’t stand another hour, and from which she was fairly forced to flee.
The fishing party arrived home in a very gay mood, despite the incident of Ruth’s involuntary bath. Mary Cox kept away from the victim of the accident and when the others chaffed Ruth, and asked her how she came to topple over the rock, The Fox did not even change color.
Tom scolded in secret to Ruth about Mary. “She ought to be sent home. I’ll not feel that you’re safe any time she is in your company. I’ve a mind to tell Miss Kate Stone,” he said.
“I’ll be dreadfully angry if you do such a thing, Tom,” Ruth assured him, and that promise was sufficient to keep the boy quiet.
They were all tired and not even Helen objected when bed was proposed that night. In fact, Heavy went to sleep in her chair, and they had a dreadful time waking her up and keeping her awake long enough for her to undress, say her prayers, and get into bed.
In the other girls’ room Ruth and her companions spent little time in talking or frolicking. Nita had begged to sleep with Mercy, with whom she had spent considerable time that day and evening; and the lame girl and the runaway were apparently both asleep before Ruth and Helen got settled for the night.
Then Helen dropped asleep between yawns and Ruth found herself lying wide-awake, staring at the faintly illuminated ceiling. Of a sudden, sleep had fled from her eyelids. The happenings of the day, the mystery of Nita, the meanness of Mary Cox, her own trouble at the mill, the impossibility of her going to Briarwood next term unless she found some way of raising money for her tuition and board, and many, many other thoughts, trooped through Ruth Fielding’s mind for more than an hour.
Mostly the troublesome thoughts were of her poverty and the seeming impossibility of her ever discovering any way to earn such a quantity of money as three hundred and fifty dollars. Her chum, lying asleep beside her, did not dream of this problem that continually troubled Ruth’s mind.
The clock down stairs tolled eleven solemn strokes. Ruth did not move. She might have been sound asleep, save for her open eyes, their gaze fixed upon the ceiling. Suddenly a beam of light flashed in at one window, swinging from right to left, like the blade of a phantom scythe, and back again.
Ruth did not move, but the beam of light took her attention immediately from her former thoughts. Again and once again the flash of light was repeated. Then she suddenly realized what it was. Somebody was walking down the path toward the private dock, swinging a lantern.
She would have given it no further thought had not a door latch clicked. Whether it was the latch of her room, or another of the bedrooms on this floor of the bungalow, Ruth could not tell. But in a moment she heard the balustrade of the stair creak.