a fortnight; but nothing had as yet been planned in detail.
Mr. Hammond, president of the Alectrion Film Corporation had conceived the idea of a spectacular production on the screen of “The Forty-Niners” – as the title implied, a picture of the early gold digging in the West. He had heard of an abandoned mining camp in Mohave County, Arizona, which could easily and cheaply be put into the condition it was before its inhabitants stampeded for other gold diggings.
Mr. Hammond desired to have most of the scenes taken at Freezeout Camp and he had talked over the plot of the story with Ruth Fielding, whose previous successes as a scenario writer were remarkable. The producer wished, too, that Ruth should visit the abandoned mining camp to get her “local color” and to be on the scene when his company arrived to make the films.
There was a particular reason, too, why Ruth had a more than ordinary interest in this proposed production. Instead of being paid outright for her work as the writer of the scenario, some of her own money was to be invested in the picture. Having taken up the making of motion pictures seriously and hoping to make it her livelihood after graduating from college, Ruth wished her money as well as her brains to work for her.
Nor was the president of the Alectrion Film Corporation doing an unprecedented thing in making this arrangement. In this way the shrewd capitalists behind the great film-making companies have obtained the best work from chief directors, the most brilliant screen stars, and the more successful scenario writers. To give those who show special talent in the chief departments of the motion picture industry a financial interest in the work, has proved gainful to all concerned.
Ruth had walked slowly to the window, and she stood a moment looking out into the warm June dusk. The campus was deserted, but lights glimmered everywhere in the windows of the Ardmore dormitories. This was the evening before Commencement Day and most of the seniors and juniors were holding receptions, or “tea fights.”
“What do you think, girls?” Ruth said thoughtfully. “Of course, we’ll have to have the guide Mr. Hammond spoke about, and a packtrain anyway. And the more girls the merrier.”
“Bully!” breathed the slangy Miss Stone, wiggling in her chair.
“Oh, I vote we do, Ruth. Have ’em all meet at Yucca and – ”
Suddenly Ruth cried out and sprang back from the window.
“What’s the matter, dear?” asked Helen, rushing over to her and seizing her chum’s arm.
“What bit you, Ruth Fielding? A mosquito?” demanded Jennie.
“Sh! girls,” breathed the girl of the Red Mill softly. “There’s somebody just under this window – on the ledge!”
CHAPTER II – EAVESDROPPING
Helen tiptoed to the window and peered out suddenly. She expected to catch the eavesdropper, but —
“Why, there’s nobody here, Ruth,” she complained.
“No-o?”
“Not a soul. The ledge is bare away to the end. You – you must have been mistaken, dear.”
Ruth looked out again and Jennie Stone crowded in between them, likewise eager to see.
“I know there was a girl there,” whispered Ruth. “She lay right under this window.”
“But what for? Trying to scare us?” asked Helen.
“Trying to break her own neck, I should think,” sniffed Jennie. “Who’d risk climbing along this ledge?”
“I have,” confessed Helen. “It’s not such a stunt. Other girls have.”
“But why?” demanded the plump freshman. “What was she here for?”
“Listening, I tell you,” Helen said.
“To what? We weren’t discussing buried treasure – or even any personal scandal,” laughed Jennie. “What do you think, Ruth?”
“That is strange,” murmured the girl of the Red Mill reflectively.
“The strangest thing is where she could have gone so quickly,” said Helen.
“Pshaw! around the corner – the nearest corner, of course,” observed Jennie with conviction.
“Oh! I didn’t think of that,” cried Ruth, and went to the other window, for the study shared during their freshman year by her and Helen Cameron was a corner room with windows looking both west and south.
When the trio of puzzled girls looked out of the other open window, however, the wide ledge of sandstone which ran all around Dare Hall just beneath the second story windows was deserted.
“Who lives along that way?” asked Jennie, meaning the occupants of the several rooms the windows of which overlooked the ledge on the west side of the building.
“Why – May MacGreggor for one,” said Helen. “But it wouldn’t be May. She’s not snoopy.”
“I should say not! Nor is Rebecca Frayne,” Ruth said. “She has the fifth room away. And girls! I believe Rebecca would be delighted to go with us to Arizona.”
“Oh – well – Could she go?” asked Helen pointedly.
“Perhaps. Maybe it can be arranged,” Ruth said reflectively.
She seemed to wish to lead the attention of the other two from the mystery of the girl she had observed on the ledge. But Helen, who knew her so well, pinched Ruth’s arm and whispered:
“I believe you know who it was, Ruthie Fielding. You can’t fool me.”
“Sh!” admonished her friend, and because Ruth’s influence was very strong with the black-eyed girl, the latter said no more about the mystery just then.
Ruth Fielding’s influence over Helen had begun some years before – indeed, almost as soon as Ruth herself, a heart-sore little orphan, had arrived at the Red Mill to live with her Uncle Jabez and his little old housekeeper, Aunt Alvirah, “who was nobody’s relative, but everybody’s aunt.”
Helen and her twin brother, Tom Cameron, were the first friends Ruth made, and in the first volume of this series of stories, entitled, “Ruth Fielding of the Red Mill,” is related the birth and growth of this friendship. Ruth and Helen go to Briarwood Hall for succeeding terms until they are ready for college; and their life there and their adventures during their vacations at Snow Camp, at Lighthouse Point, at Silver Ranch, at Cliff Island, at Sunrise Farm, with the Gypsies, in Moving Pictures and Down in Dixie are related in successive volumes.
Following this first vacation trip Ruth and Helen, with their old chum Jennie Stone, entered Ardmore College, and in “Ruth Fielding at College; Or, The Missing Examination Papers,” the happenings of the chums’ freshman year at this institution for higher education are narrated.
The present story, the twelfth of the series, opens during the closing days of the college year. Ruth’s plans for the summer – or for the early weeks of it at least – are practically made.
The trip West, into the Hualapai Range of Arizona for the business of making a moving picture of “The Forty-Niners” had already stirred the imagination of Ruth and
