CHAPTER II

AN IDLE DAY

Excited as she was, Ruth Fielding had not lost her usual sense of
caution. Uncle Jabez Potter’s serious need on the roof of the Red Mill
called for instant help; but Ruth stopped long enough on the ell roof of
the farmhouse, having climbed one ladder, to discard the sports skirt
that retarded her free movements.

“Oh, Ruth!” shrieked Helen again from below.

“Take care, my pretty!” wailed Aunt Alvirah, and then rose with her
usual murmur of “Oh, my back! and oh, my bones!” to hobble out into the
sunshine, the better to see what Ruth was doing.

Ruth started up the second, and longer, ladder in her bloomers and found
herself much less trammeled. But the ladder wabbled threateningly,
although she knew Ben, the hired man, had placed it as firmly as a
ladder could be placed. It was the length of the ladder that made it
spring so.

She was a clear-headed and athletic girl. She had never shrunk from a
hard task when it faced her. Indeed, Ruth, from the very time the reader
first meets her in the initial volume of this series, entitled “Ruth
Fielding of the Red Mill,” had proved herself a remarkably courageous
person.

As an orphan she had come to her great-uncle’s mill and home, and Jabez
Potter had taken her in “out of charity” as he at first grudgingly
expressed it. Many a time since that long-past occasion the miserly
miller had admitted (secretly if not openly) that he had been amply
repaid for giving Ruth shelter.

Helen Cameron and her twin brother, Tom, had been Ruth’s first young
friends in this neighborhood. With Helen she had attended Briarwood Hall
and, later still, Ardmore College. While the Great War was on both Ruth
and Helen were in France and did more than their bit for humanity in the
Red Cross service.

But before Ruth had gone to France and since she had returned, her heart
and mind had been firmly fixed upon motion picture making. She had
achieved no little success in writing scripts for pictures and, of late,
had helped direct them.

She had, only the week before, returned from a seven-weeks’ sojourn at
the Thousand Islands, where she had been engaged, with a company from
the Alectrion Film Corporation studios, in making a picture in which an
Indian girl whom Ruth had befriended played a prominent part.

In this story, “Ruth Fielding on the St. Lawrence,” the young woman had
been more than ever convinced that if she was to make the kind of
pictures she desired to make, she must have a free hand. Although Mr.
Hammond, the president of the Alectrion Corporation, was her friend and
had always treated her liberally, he now had so many irons in the fire
that Ruth began to feel that she was merely one of his “hired hands.”

As she had just now said to Aunt Alvirah, her uncle’s old housekeeper,
and to Helen, her chum, she wished to have her own producing company and
to feel that her word was to be final in the making of the pictures she
wrote. She had the germ of a splendid idea for a feature film in her
mind, she wanted to use Wonota, the Osage Indian girl in it. All she
lacked was the financial backing that such an undertaking must have.

Thoughts of the picture and her financial situation were quite driven
out of Ruth’s mind, however, by Uncle Jabez Potter’s peril on the roof
of the old mill. He had fainted up there in the sun—or something even
more serious had happened to him—and there was nobody near who could
help the old man but Ruth.

The quivering of the long ladder to the peak of the mill roof made Ruth
ascend very carefully. But she continued to look up and told herself
over and over that the ladder would bear her weight a dozen times. At
last she reached the roof and scrambled up on the board that Ben had
laid to the scaffold where Uncle Jabez had been at work.

The old man lay with his legs half over the edge of the scaffold. She
saw now that his position was more secure than she had thought. And
before she reached him the old man began to move again, struggling to
sit up.

“Uncle Jabez! Uncle Jabez! Wait!” cried Ruth. “Let me help you.”

“I calkerlate somebody’s got to help me,” muttered the miller. “Ruth,
that you? I declare I can’t scurce see a thing. Guess your Aunt Alvirah
was right. That sun struck me right in the pit of the stomach, seems so.
All went black before my eyes. I don’t see how I am going to get down
off’n this roof, Niece Ruth.”

“I am going to help you, Uncle Jabez,” the girl said confidently. “This
sun is awful!”

There was no use in telling him now that he had been warned. Nor was
Ruth one of those “I-told-you-so” people. Besides, the old miller was in
no condition to be scolded for his folly.

She helped him to his feet, but he was very uncertain on them, and for a
minute or two Ruth feared she could not get him along the narrow plank
to the top of the ladder. If he pitched off the board she knew she could
not hold him, although he was not a heavy man.

If Uncle Jabez was stubborn in one thing, he was in all. He was
determined to get down to the ground, and he did so. But he confessed
that he never would have made it without his niece’s help!

From the ell roof of the house Ruth called impatiently to Helen to get
into her car and go for the doctor. Uncle Jabez was too confused in his
mind to veto the command, although at another time he would have thought
instantly of the expense of the doctor’s visit.

He really had suffered a slight sunstroke. His age and physical
condition doubtless had something to do with his present misfortune—and
that the physician stated in so many words when he arrived. He had
warned the miller more than a year before that he should retire from
active work; and the fact that he had not done so added greatly to the
danger of his present attack.

In any case, within a few hours it became evident to all about him that
the old man would not be able to attend to business of any kind or to
exert himself physically to any degree for a long time to come.

Aside from the alarm Ruth felt because of the miller’s misfortune, there
was a personal thought that rasped her mind continually. The matter of
getting Uncle Jabez to back her financially in the making of her first
independent picture had gone by the board.

He was forbidden to think of business. The mill would be run by Ben for
a while, or until the present contracts were filled and the grain on
hand made into flour or meal. Then the Red Mill, for the first time in
many generations, would be shut down and—perhaps—the stones would never
turn again.

In spite of her sympathy for Uncle Jabez and her fears for his future,
Ruth Fielding could not keep her thoughts from dwelling on her own
ill-fortune. The accident at this time seemed to be a calamity for her.

Tom Cameron was like his sister Helen—“as like as two peas in a pod,”
Aunt Alvirah Boggs often said. He had the same black hair and black eyes
and the clear, olive complexion that was a legacy from his half-Spanish
mother now long since dead. As Helen had intimated to Ruth, he had, too,
his share of their mother’s fortune and would have been glad to aid Ruth
in her desire for a producing company had the girl of the Red Mill been
willing to accept such help.

The latter, however, had a strong and deep-rooted objection to accepting
any such help from any such quarter!

Not that Ruth did not consider Tom Cameron almost as much her chum as
she did his sister. Indeed, it was exactly in that character that Ruth
wished to think of Tom and have Tom think of her.

Even before the war Tom had shown Ruth that he considered her the one
girl in the world for him. He could not seriously see any other girl as
a possible mate for life. And, secretly, Ruth would have been greatly
disappointed if Tom had turned to any other girl.

But she would not become engaged to him. She did not believe in long
engagements. And now, with the war finished six months and more before,
she began to feel very strongly that there was something wrong with Tom
Cameron.

She had thought him ambitious in those early days when they used to have
their enthusiastic talks about the future. Mr. Cameron was a dry goods
merchant in Boston. He had but recently opened a branch in New York, and
it was an important situation Tom might step into, and learn to fill.
But since he had come back from France after the armistice, Tom seemed
only to dilly-dally and shirk his job.

He was shirking it not a little one day, and instead of working was
lounging along Front and South Streets, in New York City, watching the
tramp steamships being laden and viewing the long bowsprits of the great
four and five-masted ships thrust almost into the driveway of the
water-front streets.

There is always color and a certain bustle along the wharves. And, here
and there, a silent, empty, roofed dock will yawn, offering shade on a
hot day, with a faint, “smelly” breath of river air sucking up from the
open end of the dock.

Having walked far, and the sun being hot, Tom entered one of these
inviting tunnels and strolled to the very end from which he could see
all four of the bridges that span the East River, as well as the varied
traffic thereon, and the serried banks of warehouses and other tall
buildings on either side of the stream.

Tom had been walking to get away from his own thoughts. Unfortunately,
he had found the thoughts quite up to his mark in pedestrianism. They
had kept in step with him!

Suddenly it was his luck—he was afterward sure it was good luck—to spy
the hoop-shouldered figure of a man on the opposite side of the dock,
sitting on a soap-box. The stranger’s back was toward Tom, but the
latter saw that there was room for two to sit on that box. He walked
across the broad dock and said, “Hello!”

The other looked up, and Tom first saw a weather-beaten, deeply lined
face that belonged to a man well past the half-century mark. It was a
shrewd face, too, but not cunning. Though the eyes were surrounded by
those wrinkles that always mark the eyes of a mariner, there was a
trusting light in their watery depths that aided in forming Tom’s
opinion that here was an old fellow whose long life at sea and acquired
fund of sea-lore had not deprived him of a certain simplicity that was
inherent.

The man was whittling a soft pine block into the shape of a little toy,
and several untouched similar blocks, as well as partly finished toys,
were in a basket at his feet.

No! At his foot! For the man’s right leg, sticking straight out before
him as he sat on the box, ended in a wooden stump, painted green and
with a brass ferrule on it. The old toy maker was a cripple.

“Ahoy, mate!” was his reply to Tom’s cheerful greeting. “Was you looking
for some little knickknack to take home to the missus, or mebbe the
kiddies?”

“Do I look as old as all that?” laughed Tom. “I’m not married yet, and
no chance of it. Do you make these for a living?” he added.

“Well, it helps out. I got a pension. I’ve made ’em down here and
peddled ’em along the wharves ever since I got my timber-toe. I was
always handy with my knife.

“If I hadn’t been,” he added practically, “I’d have lost more’n my leg
that time in Portygee Pedro’s joint at Nassau. They flung down a heavy
mahogany bar onto me and pinned me by the foot and ankle to the floor.
There I lay and fought ’em off—a gang of six black-faced rascals—till
the coppers come, broke in the door, and rescued of me.”

Tom Cameron’s eyes began to sparkle. He looked aside at the man
curiously. Whether he was entirely truthful or not, here was a fellow
who could spin a real yarn of adventure if he would.

“This surely is my lucky day,” thought Tom.