Kitabı oku: «Ruth Fielding In the Saddle; College Girls in the Land of Gold», sayfa 9
CHAPTER XXII – RUTH HEARS SOMETHING
Ruth Fielding was particularly interested in the situation of “the hermit,” Edith Phelps’ brother. But she was not deeply enough interested in him or in his desires to give up her own expectation from the gold-bearing ledge on the ridge.
She remembered very clearly what Helen Cameron had told her about this young Royal Phelps. She had not known his name, of course, and the fact that Min Peters that day on the ridge had not explained fully what Royal’s last name was, had caused the girl some further puzzlement.
The character the tale about Edith’s brother had given that young man did not seem to fit this “hermit” either. This fellow seemed so gentlemanly and so amusing, that she could scarcely believe him the worthless character he was pictured. Yet, his presence here in the wilds, and Edith’s coming out to him so secretly, pointed to a mystery that teased the girl of the Red Mill.
When they came to the cabin door, and Royal Phelps slid carefully out of her saddle, Ruth said easily:
“I wish you’d tell me all about yourself, Mr. Phelps. I am curious – and frank to say so.”
“I don’t blame you,” he admitted, smiling suddenly again – and Ruth thought that smile the most disarming she had ever seen. Royal Phelps might have been disgraced at college, but she believed it must have been through his fun-loving disposition rather than because of any viciousness.
“I don’t blame you for feeling curiosity,” the young man repeated, seating himself gingerly in the doorway. “If I had a chair I’d offer it to you, Miss Fielding.”
“Thanks. I’ll hop on my pony. I’ll get yours for you before I go.”
“Wait a bit,” he urged. “I am going with you when you return to that town. That wild beast of a horse may be rampaging around again.”
“Ugh!” ejaculated Ruth with no feigned shudder. “He was awful!”
“Now you’ve said something! But you are a mighty cool girl, Miss Fielding. What Edie would have done – ”
“She would have done quite as well as I, I have no doubt,” Ruth hastened to say. “And I have been in the West before, Mr. Phelps.”
“Yes? You are really a movie actor?”
“Sometimes.”
“And a college girl?”
“Always!” laughed his visitor.
“I believe you are puzzling me intentionally.”
“I told you that I was puzzled about you.”
“I suppose so,” he laughed. “Well, tit for tat. You tell me and I’ll tell you.”
“I trust to your honor,” she said, with mock seriousness. “I will tell you my secret. Really, I am not a movie actress – save by brevet.”
“I thought not!” he exclaimed with warmth.
“Why, they are very nice folk!” Ruth told him. “Much nicer than you suppose. I am really writing the scenario Mr. Hammond is producing.”
“Goodness!” he exclaimed. “A literary person?”
“Exactly.”
“But why didn’t Edie tell me something about you? She went over there and took a peep at you.”
“I fancied so. The girls thought her an Indian squaw. That would please Edie – if I know her at all,” said Ruth with sarcasm.
“I’ll have to tell her,” he grinned.
“Better not. She does not like us any too well. Us freshmen, I mean. You know,” Ruth decided to explain, “there is an insurmountable wall between freshmen and sophs.”
“I ought to know,” murmured Royal Phelps, and his face clouded.
Ruth, determined to get to the root of this mysterious matter, thrust in a deep probe: “I believe you have been to college, Mr. Phelps?”
He reddened to his ears. “Oh, yes,” he answered shortly.
“And then did you come out here to go into the mining business?” she continued, with some cruelty, for he was writhing.
“After the pater put me out – yes,” he said, looking directly at her now, even though his face flamed.
Ruth was doubly assured that Royal Phelps could not be as black as he was painted. “Though I do not believe any painter could reflect the Italian sunset hue that now mantles his brow,” she thought.
“I am sorry that you have had trouble with your father. Is it insurmountable?” she asked him quietly, and with the air that always gave even strangers confidence in Ruth Fielding.
“I hope not,” he admitted. “I was mad enough when I came away. I just wanted to ‘show him.’ But now I’d like to show him. Do – do you get me?”
“There is no difference in the words, but a great deal in the inflection, Mr. Phelps,” Ruth said quietly.
“Well. You’re an understandable girl. After I had come a cropper at Harvard – silly thing, too, but made the whole faculty wild,” and here he grinned like a naughty small boy at the remembrance – “the pater said I wasn’t worth the powder to blow me to Halifax. And I guess he was right. But he’d not given me a chance.
“Said I’d never done a lick of work and probably wouldn’t. Said I was cut out for a rich man’s wastrel or a tramp. Said I shouldn’t be the first with his money. Told James to show me the outer portal with the brass plate on it, and bring in the ‘welcome’ mat so that I wouldn’t stand there and think it meant me.
“So I came away from there,” finished Royal Phelps with a wry face.
“Oh, that was terrible!” Ruth declared with clasped hands and all the sympathy that the most exacting prodigal could expect. “But, of course, he didn’t mean it.”
“Mean it? You don’t know Costigan Phelps. He never says anything he doesn’t mean. Let me tell you it won’t be a slippery day when I show up at the paternal mansion. The pater certainly will not run out and fall on either my neck or his own. There’ll be nobody at the home plate to see me coming and hail me: ‘Kill the fatted prodigal; here comes the calf!’ Believe me!”
“Oh, Mr. Phelps!” begged Ruth. “Don’t talk that way. I know just how you feel. And you are trying to hide it – ”
“With airy persiflage – yes,” he admitted, turning serious. “Well, pater’s made a lot of money in mines. I said to Edie: ‘I’ll shoot for the West and locate a few and so attract his attention to the Young Napoleon of mines in his own field.’ It looked easy.”
“Of course,” whispered Ruth.
“But it wasn’t.”
“Of course again,” and the girl smiled.
“Grin away. It helps you to bear it,” scoffed Royal Phelps. “But it doesn’t help the ‘down and outer’ a bit to grin. I know. I’ve tried it ever since last fall.”
“Oh!”
“I finally got to rummaging out through these hills. I came with a party of sheep herders. You know the Prodigal Son only herded hogs. That’s an aristocratic game out here in the West beside sheep herding. Believe me!
“It puts a man in the last row when he fools with sheep. When I went down to Yucca nobody would have anything to do with me but old Braun. And he was owning sheep right then.
“If I went into a place the fellows would hold their noses and tiptoe out. You know, it’s a joke out here: A couple of fellows made a bet as to which was the most odoriferous – a sheep or a Greaser. So they put up the money and selected a judge.
“They brought the sheep into the judge’s cabin and the judge fainted. Then they brought in the Greaser and the sheep fainted. So, you see, aside from Greasers, I didn’t have many what you’d call close friends.”
Ruth’s lips formed the words “Poor boy!” but she would not have given voice to them for the world. Still, for some reason, Royal Phelps, who was looking directly at her, nodded his head gratefully.
“Tough times, eh? Well, I’d seen something up here in these hills. I’d been studying about mineral deposits – especially gold signs. I saved enough money to get a small outfit and this pony I ride. I’d brought my gun on from the East. I started out prospecting with scarcely a grubstake. But nobody around here would have trusted a tenderfoot like me. I was bound to do it on my lonely, if I did it at all.”
“Weren’t you afraid to start off alone?” asked Ruth. “Mr. Peters says it is dangerous for one to go prospecting.”
“Yes. But lots of the old-timers do. And this ‘new-timer’ did it. Nothing bit me,” he added dryly.
“So I came back here and knocked up this cabin. Pretty good for ‘mamma’s baby boy,’ isn’t it?” and he laughed shortly. “That’s what some of the Lazy C punchers called me when I first came into their neighborhood.
“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
Royal Phelps continued very grave and silent for a few moments after Ruth’s last statement. Then he groaned.
“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
Freezeout Camp had awakened. Many of the old shacks and cabins had been repaired and made habitable for the purposes of the moving picture company. The largest dance hall – “The Palace of Pleasure” as it was called on the film – was just as Flapjack Peters remembered it, back in an earlier rush for placer gold to this spot.
Behind the rough bar, on the shelves, however, were only empty bottles, or, at most, those filled with colored water. Mr. Hammond had been careful to keep liquor out of the rejuvenated camp.
Flapjack Peters began to look like a different man. Whether it was his enforced abstinence from drink, or the fact that he saw ahead the possibility of wealth and the tall hat and white vest of which he had dreamed, he walked erect and looked every man straight in the eye.
“It gets me!” said Min to Ruth Fielding. “Pop ain’t looked like this since I kin remember.”
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.
