THE PLOT DEVELOPS
Ruth had insisted upon Wonota's remaining at the Red Mill from the hour
she had ridden there for protection. Not that they believed Fenbrook
would actually harm the Indian girl after he had cooled down. But it was
better that she should be in Ruth's care as long as she was to work
somewhat under the latter's tutelage.
Besides, it gave the picture writer a chance to study her subject. It
would be too much to expect that Wonota could play a difficult part. She
had had no experience in acting. Ruth knew that she must fit a part to
Wonota, not the girl to a part. In other words, the Indian girl was
merely a type for screen exploitation, and the picture Ruth wrote must
be fitted to her capabilities.
Grasping, like any talented writer does, at any straw of novelty, Ruth
had seen possibilities in the little incident Aunt Alvirah had told
about her ancestor who had crossed the Western plains in the early
emigrant days. She meant to open her story with a similar incident, as
a prologue to the actual play.
Ruth made her heroine (the part she wished to fit to Wonota, the Osage
Indian girl) repay in part the debt her family owed the white physician
by saving a descendant of the physician from peril in the Indian
country. This young man, the hero, is attracted by the Indian maid who
has saved his life; but he is under the influence of a New York girl,
one of the tourist party, to whom he is tentatively engaged.
But the New York girl deserts the hero when he gets into difficulty in
New York. He is accused of a crime that may send him to the penitentiary
for a long term and there seems no way to disprove the crime. Word of
his peril comes to the Indian maid in her Western home. She knows and
suspects the honesty of the timber men with whom the hero is connected
in business. She discovers these villains are the guilty ones, and she
travels to New York to testify for him and to clear him of the charge.
The end of the story, as well as the beginning, was to be filmed in the
wilds.
With the incidents of her plot gradually taking form in her mind and
being jotted down on paper, Ruth's hours began to be very full. She was
with Wonota as much as possible, and the Indian girl began to show an
almost doglike devotion to the girl of the Red Mill.
"That is not to be wondered at, of course," Jennie Stone said, as she
was about to return to her New York home. "Everybody falls for our Ruth.
It's a wonder to me that she has not been elected to the presidency."
"Wait till we women get the vote," declared Helen. "Then we'll send Ruth
to the chair."
"Goodness!" ejaculated Jennie. "That sounds terrible, Nell! One might
think you mean the electric chair."
"Is there much difference, after all, between that and the presidential
chair?" Helen demanded, chuckling. "The way some people talk about a
president!"
"We are a loose-talking people," Ruth interrupted gravely, "and I think
you girls talk almost as irresponsibly as anybody I ever heard."
"List to the stern and uncompromising Ruthie," scoffed Jennie. "I am
glad I am going back to Aunt Kate. She is a spinster, I admit; but she
isn't anywhere near as old-maid-like as Ruth Fielding."
"I'll tell Tom about that," said Tom's sister wickedly.
"Spinsters are the balance-wheel of the universe machinery," declared
Ruth, laughing. "I always have admired them. But, joking aside, at this
time when the whole world should be so grateful and so much in earnest
because of the end of a terrible war, trivial matters and trivial talk
somehow seems to jar."
"Not so! Not so!" cried Helen vigorously. "We have been holding in and
trying to keep cheerful with the fear at our hearts that some loved one
would suddenly be taken. It was not lightness of heart that made people
dance and act as though rattled-pated during the war. It was an attempt
to hide that awful fear in their hearts. See how the people in Cheslow
acted as though they were crazy the night of the armistice. And did you
read what the papers said about the times in New York? It was only a
natural outbreak."
"Well," remarked. Ruth, shrugging her shoulders, "you certainly have got
off the subject of old maids--bless 'em! Give my love to your Aunt Kate,
Jennie, and when we come to the city to take the shots for this picture,
I'll surely see her."
"Hi!" cried Miss Stone energetically. "I guess you will! You'll come
right to the house and stay with us during that time!"
"Oh, no. I shall have Wonota with me. We will stay at a hotel. Our hours
are always so uncertain when we shoot a picture that I could not
undertake to be at any private house."
There was some discussion over this. Ruth did not intend to let Wonota
out of her sight much while the picture was being made. Nor did she
propose to let the script of the picture out of her sight until copies
could be made of it, and the continuity man had made his version for the
director. Ruth was not going to run the risk of losing another scenario,
as she had once while Down East.
Ruth put in two weeks' hard work on the new story. As she laughingly
said, she ate, slept, and talked movies all the time. Wonota had to
amuse herself; but that did not seem hard for the Indian girl to do. She
was naturally of a very quiet disposition. She sat by Aunt Alvirah for
hours doing beadwork while the old woman darned or knitted.
"You wouldn't ever suspect she was a Red Indian unless you looked at
her," Aunt Alvirah confessed to the rest of the family. "She's a very
nice girl."
As for Wonota, she said:
"I used to sit beside my grandmother and work like this. Yes, Chief
Totantora taught me to shoot and paddle a canoe, and to do many other
things out-of-doors. But my grandmother was the head woman of our tribe,
and her beadwork and dyed porcupine-quill work was the finest you ever
saw, Ruth Fielding. I was sorry to leave my war-bag with Dakota Joe. It
had in it many keepsakes my grandmother gave me before she passed to
the Land of the Spirits."
A demand had been made upon the proprietor of the Wild West Show for
Wonota's possessions, but the man had refused to give them up. The girl
had not brought away with her even the rifle she had used so
successfully in the show. But her pony, West Wind, was stabled in the
Red Mill barn. Indeed, Uncle Jabez had begun to hint that the animal was
"eating its head off." The miller could not help showing what Aunt
Alvirah called "his stingy streak" in spite of the fact that he truly
was interested in the Indian maid and liked her.
"That redskin gal," he confessed in private to Ruth, "is a pretty shrewd
and sensible gal. She got to telling me the other day how her folks
ground grist in a stone pan, or the like, using a hard-wood club to
pound it with. Right slow process of makin' flour or meal, I do allow.
"But what do you think she said when I put that up to her--about it's
being a slow job?" and the miller chuckled. "Why, she told me that all
her folks had was time, and they'd got to spend it somehow. They'd
better be grinding corn by hand than making war on their neighbors or
the whites, like they used to. She ain't so slow."
Ruth quite agreed with this. The Osage maiden was more than ordinarily
intelligent, and she began to take a deep interest in the development
of the story that Ruth was making for screen use.
"Am I to be that girl?" she asked doubtfully. "How can I play that I am
in love when I have never seen a man I cared for--in that way?"
"Can't you imagine admiring a nice young man?" asked Ruth in return.
"Not a white man like this one in your story," Wonota said soberly. "It
should be that he did more for himself--that he was more of a--a brave.
We Indians do not expect our men to be saved from disgrace by women.
Squaws are not counted of great value among the possessions of a chief."
"So you could not really respect such a man as I describe here if he
allowed a girl to help him?" Ruth asked reflectively, for Wonota's
criticism was giving her some thought.
"He should not be such a man--to need the help of a squaw," declared the
Indian maid confidently. "But, of course, it does not matter if only
palefaces are to see the picture."
But Ruth could not get the thought out of her mind. It might be that the
Indian girl had suggested a real fault in the play she was making, and
she took Mr. Hammond into her confidence about it when she sent him the
first draft of the story. Her whole idea of the principal male character
in "Brighteyes" might need recasting, and she awaited the picture
producer's verdict with some misgiving.
While she waited a red-letter day occurred---so marked both for herself
and for Helen Cameron. The chums had hoped--oh, how fondly!--that they
would hear that Tom Cameron was on his way home. But gradually the fact
that demobilization would take a long time was becoming a fixed idea in
the girls' minds.
Letters came from Tom Cameron--one each for the two girls and one for
Mr. Cameron. Instead of being on his way home, Captain Cameron had been
sent even farther from the French port to which he had originally sailed
in the huge transport from New York.
* * * * *
"I am now settled on the Rhine--one of the 'watches,' I suppose, that
the Germans used to sing about, now stamped 'Made in America,' however,"
he wrote to Ruth. "We watch a bridge-head and see that the Germans don't
carry away anything that might be needed on this side of the most
over-rated river in the world. I have come to the conclusion, since
seeing a good bit of Europe, that most of the scenery is over-rated and
does not begin to compare with the natural beauties of America. So many
foreigners come to our shores and talk about the beauty-spots of their
own countries, and so few Americans have in the past seen much of their
own land, that we accept the opinions of homesick foreigners as to the
superiority of the beauties of their father-and-mother-lands. After this
war I guess there will be more fellows determined to give the States the
'once over.'"
* * * * *
Tom always wrote an Interesting letter; but aside from that, of course
Ruth was eager to hear from him. And now, as soon as she could, she sat
down and replied to his communication. She had, too, a particular topic
on which she wished to write her friend.
Now that embattled Germany would no longer hold its prisoners
_incommunicado_, Ruth hoped that news about the imprisoned performers of
the Wild West Show might percolate through the lines. Chief Totantora
had been able but once to get a message to his daughter.
This message had reached America long before the United States had got
into the war. Although the Osage chieftain was an American (who could
claim such proud estate if Totantora could not?), the show by which he
was employed had gone direct to Germany from England, and anything
English had, from the first, been taboo in Germany. Now, of course, the
Indian girl had no idea as to where her father was.
"See if you can hear anything about those performers," Ruth wrote to
Tom. "Get word if you can to the Chief of the Osage Indians and tell him
that his daughter is with me, and that she longs for his return.
"I should love to make her happy by aiding in Chief Totantora's
reappearance in his native land. She is so sad, indeed, that I wonder if
she is going to be able to register, for the screen, the happiness that
she should finally show when my picture is brought to its conclusion."