“Well, mamma’s boy played a lone hand and found that ledge of gold ore. For it is gold I know. I had some specimens assayed.”

“So did we,” confessed Ruth, eagerly.

He scowled again. “You girls—movie actresses, college girls, or whoever you are—are likely to queer this whole business for me. Say!” he added, “that one in the overalls isn’t an Ardmore freshman, is she?”

“Hardly,” laughed Ruth. “But she needs a gold mine a good deal more than the rest of us do.”

CHAPTER XXIII—MORE OF IT

“Well, it can’t be helped! None of you can want that ledge of gold more than I do. That I know. But, of course, your claims are perfectly legitimate. It is a fact the men Edith will bring out with her are under contract. I sent her to a lawyer in Kingman who understands such things. An agreement with the men covers all the claims they may stake out on this certain ledge—dimensions in contract, and all that. I wanted to start the work, make a showing with reports of assayers and all, then send it to a friend of mine in New York who graduated from college last year and went into his father’s brokerage shop, and he would put shares in my mine on the market. With the money, I hoped to develop and—Well! what’s the use of talking about it? We’ll get our little slice and that is all, if you girls and the other folks that have staked claims hang on to your ownings.”

“Tell me how you came to get Edith into it?” asked Ruth without commenting upon his statement.

“Why, she’s a good old sport, Edie is,” declared the brother warmly. “She stood up to the pater for me. She can do most anything with him. But I’ve got to do something before he lets down the bars to me, even for her sake.

“We kept in correspondence, Edie and I, all through the winter. When I found this gold I wrote her hotfoot. I did not dare file my claim. It would cause comment and perhaps start a rush this way.”

“I see.”

“And you can easily understand,” he chuckled, “how startled Edie was when, as she told me, she learned that several girls she knew were coming out here to old Freezeout to work with some movie people. Of course, she did not tell me just who you were, Miss Fielding.”

“I suppose not.”

“No. Well, she was suspicious of you, she said. Wanted to know just when you were coming and how. She desired to get to Yucca as soon as possible, but she had to spend some time with the pater. Poor old chap! he thinks the world and all of her—in his way.

“Well, she had to do some shopping in New York, and went to a friend’s house. The chauffeur who drove them around was a decent fellow and she told him to keep a watch on the Delorphion for you folks. You went there, didn’t you?”

“Oh, yes!” exclaimed Ruth, remembering Tom’s story.

“So did she—for one night. She took the same train you did and an accident gave her some advantage. I don’t think she was nice to that friend of yours that she made tag on with her as far as Handy, where I met her,” added Royal Phelps, slowly.

“Oh!” was Ruth’s dry comment.

“But she was mighty secretive, you know,” apologized the young man. “You see, we really had to be.”

“I suppose so.”

“Well, that’s about all. Edie brought the money. She has some of her own and the pater gave her five thousand without asking a question. She and I are really partners. We’re going to show him—if we can.”

“I think it is fine of you, Mr. Phelps!” cried Ruth, with enthusiasm. “And—and I think your sister is a sister worth having.”

“Oh, you can bet she is!” he agreed. “Edie is all right. I couldn’t begin to pull this off if it were not for her. I expect the pater will say so in the end. But if I can show some money for what I have done—a bunch of it—it will be all right with him.”

Ruth made no further comment here. She saw plainly that Royal Phelps’ father probably weighed everybody and everything on the same scales upon which precious metals are weighed.

“Now I’ll catch your pony, Mr. Phelps,” she said. “If you want to ride back with me I’ll introduce you to the girls and Miss Cullam.”

“That’s nice of you. Perfectly bully, you know. Or, as they say out here, ‘skookum!’ But I guess I’d better wait till Edie returns. Let her do the honors. Besides, I am not at all sure that we sha’n’t be enemies, Miss Fielding—worse luck.”

“Oh, no, Mr. Phelps,” Ruth said warmly. “Never that!”

“I don’t know,” he grumbled, hobbling on his crutches now while she walked toward the pony that was trailing his picket-rope. “You see, I’m pretty desperate about this gold strike. I’ve a good mind to go up there on the ridge and pull up all your stakes and throw ’em away.”

“I wouldn’t,” she advised, smiling at him. “Mr. Flapjack Peters has what they call a ‘sudden’ temper; and his daughter, we found out coming over from Yucca, is a dead shot.”

“I want a big slice of that ledge,” said the young man, sighing. “Enough to make a showing in the Eastern share market.”

“Let us wait and see. You know, you might be able to buy up us girls—three of us who hold the next three claims to yours and your sister’s.”

“Oh! Would you do it?” he demanded, brightening up.

“Perhaps. And we might wait for our money till you got the mine to working on a paying basis,” Ruth said seriously. “Besides, there is Min Peters and her father. If you would take them into your company, so that they would have an income, Peters would be of great use to you, Mr. Phelps.”

“Look here! I’ll do anything fair,” cried the young man. “It isn’t that I am just after the money for the money’s sake——”

“I understand,” she told him, nodding. “We’ll talk about it later. After we get reports on the ore that Peters took specimens of, all along the ledge. But I am afraid your sister’s bringing workmen up here will start a stampede to Freezeout.”

“What do we care, as long as we get ours?” he cried, cheerfully. “Whew! The pater may think I am some good after all, before this business is over.”

They mounted their ponies and rode to the camp. They followed the very route Ruth had come, but did not see the wounded wild horse again. Royal Phelps left her when they came in sight of Freezeout and Ruth rode down into the camp alone.

She told the camp wrangler something about her adventure and the next day he went out with some of the Indians and punchers working for the outfit, and they ran down the black and white stallion.

However, Ruth had less interest in the wild stallion than she had in several other subjects. She quietly told the girls and Miss Cullam now about the possible discovery of a rich gold-bearing ledge so near camp. The Ardmore’s were naturally greatly excited.

“Stingy!” cried Trix Davenport. “Why not tell us all before?”

“Because those who found it had first rights,” Ruth said gravely. “I did stake out a claim for Rebecca. And I think Miss Cullam comes next.”

“Oh, girls! Real gold?” gasped the teacher, while Rebecca was speechless with amazement.

There was certainly a small “rush” that evening for the gold-bearing ledge. Miss Cullam staked her claim and put up a notice next to Rebecca Frayne. All the other Ardmore’s followed suit; even Ann Hicks was bitten by the fever of gold seeking.

They must have been watched, for not a few of the actors began to stake out claims as best they knew how and put up notices on the outskirts of the line along the summit of the ridge followed by those first to know of the gold.

The Western men, the teamsters and others, laughed at the whole business and tried to tease Flapjack Peters; but they could get nothing out of him. Then some of them saw samples of the ore. The next morning found Freezeout Camp almost abandoned. Everybody who had not already done so was prowling around that half mile ridge of land, trying to stake claims as near to the top of the ledge as he could.

“And at that,” Min said gloomily, “some of these fellers that caught on last may have the best of it. We don’t know where the richest ore is yet.”

Mr. Hammond and his director were nearly beside themselves. That day the company was so distraught that not a foot of film was made.

“How can I tell these crazy gold hunters how to act like real gold hunters?” growled Grimes.

“If other people come flocking in the whole thing will be ruined,” groaned Mr. Hammond.

Ruth Fielding did not believe that. She began to get a vision of what a real gold rush might mean. If they could get a bona fide stampede on the film she believed it would add a hundred per cent. to the value of “The Forty-Niners.”

CHAPTER XXIV—THE REAL THING

Two days of this excitement passed. The motion picture people “were getting down to earth again,” as Mr. Grimes said, and the girls were beginning to expect Tom Cameron’s return, when one noon the head of a procession was seen advancing through the nearest pass in the mountain range to the west. As Ruth and others watched, the procession began to wind down into the shallow gorge where the long “petered-out” placer diggings of Freezeout had been located, and where the rejuvenated town itself still stood.

“What under the sun can these people want?” gasped Mr. Hammond, the president of the film-making company, to Ruth.

The girl of the Red Mill was in riding habit and she had her pony near at hand. “I’ll ride up and see,” she said.

But the instant she had sighted the first group of hurrying riders and the first wagon, she believed she understood. Word of the “strike” at the old camp had in some way become noised abroad.

Before Edith Phelps and the men she was to hire, with the Kingman lawyer’s aid, reached the ledge her brother had located, other people had heard the news. These were the first of “the gold rush.”

She spurred her horse up into the pass and ran the pony half a mile before she turned him and raced back to Mr. Hammond. She came with flying hair and rosy cheeks to the worried president, bursting with an idea that had assailed her mind.

“Mr. Hammond! It is the greatest sight you ever saw! Get the camera man and hurry right up there to the mouth of the pass. Tell Mr. Grimes——”

“What do you mean?” snapped the president of the Alectrion Film Corporation. “Do you want to disorganize my whole company again?”

“I want to show you the greatest moving picture that ever was taken!” cried the girl of the Red Mill. “Oh, Mr. Hammond, you must take it! It must be incorporated in this film. Why! it is the real thing!”

“What is that? A joke?” he growled.

“No joke at all, I assure you,” said Ruth, patiently. “You can see them coming through the pass—and beyond—for miles and miles. Men afoot, on horseback, in all kinds of wagons, on burros—oh, it is simply great! There are hundreds and hundreds of them. Why, Mr. Hammond! this Freezeout Camp is going to be a city before night!”

The chief reason why Mr. Hammond was a wealthy man and one of the powers in the motion picture world was because he could seize upon a new idea and appreciate its value in a moment. He knew that Ruth was a sane girl and that she had judgment, as well as imagination. He gaped at her for a moment, perhaps; the next he was shouting for Mr. Grimes, for the camera men, for the horse wrangler, and for the “call-boy” to round up the company.

In half an hour a train set out for the pass, which met the first of the advance guard of gold seekers pouring down into the valley. The eager-faced men of all ages and apparently of all walks in life hurried on almost silently toward the spot where they were told a ledge of free gold had been found.

There were roughly dressed teamsters, herdsmen, nondescripts; there were Mexicans and Indians; there were well dressed city men—lawyers, doctors, other professional men, perhaps. Afterward Ruth read in an Arizona newspaper that such a typical stampede to any new-found gold or silver strike had not been seen in a decade.

A camera man set up his machine in a good spot and waited for the whole film company to drift along into the pass and join the real gold seekers that streamed down toward Freezeout.

This idea of Ruth Fielding’s was the crowning achievement of her work on this film. The company came back to the cabins at evening, wearied and dust-choked, to find, as Ruth had prophesied, a veritable city on and near the creek.

The newcomers had rushed into the hills and staked out their claims, some of them on the very fringe of the valley out of which the gold-bearing ledge rose. Of course, many of these claims would be worthless.

A lively buying and selling of the more worthless claims was already under way. With the stampede had come storekeepers and wagons of foodstuffs.

That night nobody slept. Mr. Hammond, realizing what this really meant, but feeling none of the itch for digging gold that most of those on the spot experienced, organized a local constabulary. A justice of the peace was found with intelligence enough, and enough knowledge of the state ordinance, to act as magistrate.

The men were called together early in the morning in the biggest dance hall and the vast majority—indeed, it was almost unanimous—voted that liquor selling be tabooed at Freezeout.

Several men of unsavory reputations who had come, like buzzards scenting the carrion from afar, were advised to leave town and stay away. They met other men of their stripe on the trail from Handy Gulch and other such places, and reported that Freezeout was going to be run “on a Sunday-school basis”; there was nothing in it for the usual birds of prey that infest such camps.

In a few hours the party coming from Kingman with Edith Phelps and the lawyer she had engaged, arrived. The camp about the ridge grew and expanded in every direction. Most of the claimholders slept on their claims, fearing trickery. Shafts were sunk. The Phelps crowd began to set up a small crusher and cyaniding plant that had been trucked over the trails.

The moving picture was finished at last, before either Mr. Grimes or Mr. Hammond quite lost their minds. Several of the men of the company broke their contract with the Alectrion Film Corporation and would remain at the diggings. They believed their claims were valuable.

Tom had returned before this with reports from the assayer and copies of the filing of the claims. The specimen from Ruth’s claim showed one hundred and eighty dollars to the ton. The ore from Flapjack Peters and Min’s claims were, after all, the richest of any of their party, though farther down the ledge. The ore taken from those claims showed two hundred dollars to the ton.

“We’re rich—or we’re goin’ to be,” Min declared to the Ardmore girls and Miss Cullam, the last night the Eastern visitors were to remain in Freezeout. “That lawyer of R’yal Phelps is goin’ to let pop have some money and we’re both goin’ to send for clo’es—some duds! Wish you could wait and see me togged up just like a Fourth o’ July pony in the parade.”

“I wish we could, Min!” cried Jennie Stone.

“You shall come East to visit me later,” Ruth declared. “Won’t you, Min? We’ll all show you a good time there.”

“As though you hadn’t showed me the best time I ever had already,” choked the Yucca girl. “But I’ll come—after I git used to my new clo’es.”

“Have you and your father really made a bargain with Royal Phelps?” Miss Cullam asked, as much interested in the welfare of the suddenly enriched girl as her pupils.

“Yes, Ma’am. Pop’s going to have an office in the new company, too. And Mr. Phelps is goin’ to git backin’ from the East and buy up all the adjoinin’ claims that he can.”

“He’ll have all ours, in time,” said Helen. “That’s lots better than each of us trying to develop her little claim. Oh, that Phelps man is smart.”

“And what about Edith?” demanded the honest Ruth. “We’ve got to praise her, too.”

There was silence. Finally, Miss Cullam said dryly: “She seems to have no very enthusiastic friends in the audience, Miss Fielding.”

“Oh, well,” Ruth said, laughing, “we none of us like Edith.”

“How about liking her brother?” asked Jennie Stone, and she seemed to say it pointedly.

CHAPTER XXV—UNCLE JABEZ IS CONVERTED

“Hi mighty!” ejaculated Uncle Jabez Potter, unwillingly enough and under his breath in the middle of the picture, “d’ye mean to say you done all that, Niece Ruth?”

“I helped,” said Ruth, modestly.

“Why, it’s as natcheral as the stepstun, I swan!” gasped the miller. “I can ‘member hearin’ many of the men that went out there in the airly days tell about what it was like. This is jest like they said it was. I don’t see how ye did it—an’ you was never born even, when them things was like that.”

“Don’t say that, Uncle Jabez,” Ruth declared. “For I saw a little bit of the real thing. They write me that Freezeout Camp has taken on a new lease of life. Mr. Phelps says,” and she blushed a little, but it was dark and nobody saw it, “that we are all going to make a lot of money out of the Freezeout Ledge.”

But Uncle Jabez Potter was not listening. He was enthralled again in the picture of old days in the mining country. It seemed as though, at last, the old miller was converted to the belief that his grand-niece knew a deal more than he had given her credit for. To his mind, that she knew how to make money was the more important thing.

The final flash of the film reflected on the screen passed and Uncle Jabez and Ruth rose to go. It was dark in the theatre and the girl led the old man out by the hand. Somehow he clung to her hand more tightly than was usually his custom.

“’Tis a wonderful thing, Niece Ruth, I allow,” he said when they came out into the lamplight of Cheslow’s main street. “I—I dunno. You young folks seems ter have got clean ahead of us older ones. There’s things that I ain’t never hearn tell of, I guess.”

Ruth Fielding laughed. “Why, Uncle Jabez,” she said, “the world is just full of such a number of things that neither of us knows much about that that’s what makes it worth living in.”

“I dunno; I dunno,” he muttered. “Guess you’ve got to know most of ’em now you’ve gone to that college.”

“I am beginning to get a taste of some of them,” she cried. “You know I have three more years to spend at Ardmore before I can take a degree.”

“Huh! Wal, it don’t re’lly seem as though knowin’ so much did a body any good in this world. I hev got along on what little they knocked inter my head at deestrict school. And I’ve made a livin’ an’ something more. But I never could write a movin’ picture scenario, that’s true. And if there’s so much money in ’em——”

“Mr. Hammond writes me that he’s sure there is going to be a lot of money in this one. The State rights are bringing the corporation in thousands. Of course, my share is comparatively small; but I feel already amply paid for my six weeks spent in Arizona.”

This, however, is somewhat ahead of the story. Uncle Jabez’ conversion was bound to be a slow process. When the party returned from the West the person gladdest to see Ruth Fielding was Aunt Alvirah.

The strong and vigorous girl was rather shocked to find the little old woman so feeble. She did not get around the kitchen or out of doors nearly as actively as had been her wont.

“Oh, my back! an’ oh, my bones! Seems ter me, my pretty,” she said, sinking into her rocking chair, “that things is sort o’ slippin’ away from me. I feel that I am a-growin’ lazy.”

“Lazy! You couldn’t be lazy, Aunt Alvirah,” laughed the girl of the Red Mill.

“Oh, yes; I ‘spect I could,” said Aunt Alvirah, nodding. “This here M’lissy your uncle’s hired to help do the work, is a right capable girl. And she’s made me lazy. If I undertake ter do a thing, she’s there before me an’ has got it done.”

“You need to sit still and let others do the work now,” Ruth urged.

“I dunno. What good am I to Jabez Potter? He didn’t take me out o’ the poorhouse fifteen year or more ago jest ter sit around here an’ play lady. No, ma’am!”

“Oh, Aunty!”

“I dunno but I’d better be back there.”

“You’d better not let Uncle Jabez hear you say so,” Ruth cried. “Maybe I don’t always know just how Uncle Jabez feels about me; but I know how he looks at you, Aunt Alvirah. Don’t dare suggest leaving the Red Mill.”

The little old woman looked at her steadily, and there were the scant tears of age in the furrows of her face.

“I shall be leavin’ it some day soon, my pretty. ’Tis a beautiful place here—the Red Mill. But there is a Place Prepared. I’m on my way there, Ruthie. But, thanks be, I kin cling with one hand to the happy years here because of you, while my other hand’s stretched out for the feel of a Hand that you can’t see, my pretty. After all, Ruthie, no matter how we live, or what we do, our livin’ is jest a preparation for our dyin’.”

Nor was this lugubrious. Aunt Alvirah was no long-visaged, unhappy creature. The other girls loved to call on her. Helen was at the Red Mill this summer quite as much as ever. Jennie Stone and Rebecca Frayne both visited Ruth after their return from Freezeout Camp.

It was a cheerful and gay life they led. There much much chatter of the happenings at Freezeout, and of the work at the new gold mining camp. Min Peters’ scrawly letters were read and re-read; her pertinent comments on all that went on were always worth reading and were sometimes actually funny.

“I wish you could see pop,” she wrote once. “I mean Mr. Henry James Peters. If ever there was a big toad in a little puddle, it’s him!

“He’s got a hat so shiny that it dazzles you when he’s out in the sun. It’s awful uncomfortable for him to wear, I know. But he wouldn’t give it up—nor the white vest and the dinky patent leather shoes he’s got on right now—for all the gold you could name.

“And I’m getting as bad. I sit around in a flowery gown, and there’s a girl come here to work in the hotel that’s trimming my nails and fixing my hands up something scandalous. Man-curing, she calls it.

“But the fine clothes has made another man of pop; and I expect they’ll improve yours truly a whole lot. When we get real used to them, sometime we’ll come East and see you. I can pretty near trust pop already to go into a rumhole here without expecting to see him come out again orey-eyed.

“Not that he’s shown any dispersition to drink again. He says his position is too important in the Freezeout Ledge Gold Mining Company for any foolishness. And I’ll tell you right now, he’s the only member of the company now that that Edie girl’s gone home that ever is dressed up on the job. Mr. Phelps works like as though he’d been used to it all his life.

“Let me tell you. His pop’s been out here to see him. ‘Looking over prospects’ he called it. But you bet you it was to see what sort of a figure his son was cutting here among sure-enough men.

“I reckon the old gentleman was satisfied. I seen them riding over the hills together, as well as wandering about the diggings. One night while he was here we had a big dance—a regular hoe-down—in the big hall.

“This here big-bug father of Mr. Royal danced with me. What do you know about that? ‘What do you think of my son?’ says he to me while we was dancing.

“Says I: ‘I think he’s got almost as much sense as though he was borned and brought up in Arizona. And he knows a whole lot more than most of our boys does.’ ‘Why,’ says he to me, ‘you’ve got a lot of good sense yourself, ain’t you?’ I guess Mr. Royal had been cracking me up to his father at that.

“Mr. Phelps—the younger, I mean—takes dinner with us most every Sunday; and he treats me just as nice and polite as though I’d been used to having my hair done up and my hands man-cured all my life.”

This letter arrived at the Red Mill on a day when Jennie and Rebecca were there, as well as Helen and her twin. There was more to Min Peters’ long epistle; but as Jennie Stone said:

“That’s enough to show how the wind is blowing. Why, I had no idea that Phelps boy would ever show such good sense as to ‘shine up’ to Min!”

“The dear girl!” sighed Ruth. “She has the making of a fine woman in her. I don’t blame Royal Phelps for liking her.”

“I imagine Edie took back a long tale of woe to her father and that he went out there to ‘look over’ Min more than he did gold prospects,” Rebecca said, tartly. “Of course, she’s awfully uncouth, and Royal Phelps is a gentleman——”

“Thus speaks the oracle!” exclaimed Helen, briskly. “Rebecca believes in putting signs on the young men of our best families who go into such regions: ‘Beware the dog.’”

“Well, he is really nice,” complained Rebecca, who could not easily be cured of snobbishness.

“I hope there are others,” announced Tom, swinging idly in the hammock.

“Fishing for compliments, I declare,” laughed Jennie, poking him.

“Why, he’s des the cutest, nicest ‘ittle sing,” cooed his sister, rocking the big fellow in the hammock.

“It’s been an awful task for you to bring him up, Nell,” drawled Jennie. “But after all, I don’t know but it’s been worth while. He’s almost human. If they’d drowned him when he was little and only raised you, I don’t know but it would have been a calamity.”

“Oh, cat’s foot!” snapped Tom, rising from the hammock with a bound. “You girls mostly give me a woful pain. You’re too biggity. Pretty soon there won’t be any comfort living in the world with you ‘advanced women.’ The men will have to go off to another planet and start all over again.

“Who’ll mend your socks and press your neckties?” laughed Ruth from her seat on the piazza railing.

“Thanks be! If there are no women the necessity for ties and socks will be done away with. And certain sure most of you college girls will never know how to do either.”

“Hear him!” cried Jennie.

“Infamous!” gasped Rebecca.

“You wait, young man,” laughed his sister. “I’ll make you pay for that.”

But Tom recovered his temper and grinned at them. Then he glanced up at Ruth.

“Come on down, Ruth, and take a walk, will you? Come off your perch.”

The girl of the Red Mill laughed at him; but she did as he asked. “Come on, I’m game.”

“No more walks,” groaned Jennie. “I scarcely cast a shadow now I’m getting so thin. That saddle work in Arizona pulled me down till I’m scarcely bigger than a thread of cotton.”

Ruth and Tom started off to go along the river road, the two who had first been friends in Cheslow and around the Red Mill. There was a smile on Ruth’s lips; but Tom looked serious. Neither of them dreamed of the strenuous adventures the future held in store for them, as will be related in our next volume, entitled “Ruth Fielding in the Red Cross; or, Doing Her Bit for Uncle Sam.”

The other young folks, remaining in the shaded farmyard, looked after them. Jennie jerked out:

“Mighty—nice—looking—couple, eh?”

Nobody made any rejoinder, but all three of Ruth’s friends gazed after her and her companion.

The couple had halted on the bridge. They were talking earnestly, and Ruth rested one hand on the railing and turned to face the young man. His big brown hand covered hers, that lay on the rail. Ruth did not withdraw it.

“Mated!” drawled Jennie Stone, and the others nodded understandingly.