REALITY
Ruth Fielding was not a coward. She had already talked so much about
Dakota Joe that she was a little ashamed to bring up the subject again.
So she made no comment upon the man in the brown coat and gray hat that
Jennie Stone declared she had seen climbing the path up the canyon wall.
Mr. Hammond was not annoyed by it. His mind was fixed upon the scenes
that could be filmed in the canyon. Like Jim Hooley, the director, his
thought was almost altogether taken up with the making of Ruth's
"Brighteyes."
The work of making the picture was almost concluded. Wonota, the Indian
maid, had lost none of her interest in the tasks set her; but she
expressed herself to Ruth as being glad that there was little more to
do.
"I do not like some things I have to do," she confessed. "It is so hard
to look, as Mr. Hooley tells me to, at that hero of yours, Miss
Fielding, as though I admired him."
"Mr. Grand? You do not like him?"
"I could never love him," said the Indian girl with confidence. "He is
too silly. Even when we are about to engage in one of the most thrilling
scenes, he looks first in the handglass to see if his hair is parted
right."
Ruth could not fail to be amused. But she said cautiously:
"But think how he would look to the audience if his hair was tousled
when it was supposed to be well brushed."
"Ah, it is not a manly task," said Wonota, with disgust. "And the Indian
man who is the villain--Tut! He is only half Indian. And he tries to
look both as though he admired me and hated the white man. It makes his
eyes go this way!" and Wonota crossed her eyes until Ruth had to cry
out.
"Don't!" she begged, "Suppose you suffered that deformity?"
"But he doesn't--that Jack Onehorse. Your Brighteyes, I am sure, would
have felt no pity for such an Indian."
"You don't have to feel pity for him," laughed Ruth. "You know, you
shoot him in the end, Wonota."
"Most certainly," agreed Wonota, closing her lips firmly. "He deserves
shooting."
The calm way in which the Indian girl spoke of this taking off of the
Indian lover who became the villain in the end of the moving picture,
rather shocked the young author.
"But," said Jennie, "Wonota it only a single generation removed from
arrant savagery. She calls a spade a spade. You shouldn't blame her. It
is civilization--which is after all a sort of make-believe--that causes
us white folk to refer to a spade as an agricultural implement."
But Ruth would not laugh. She had become so much interested in Wonota by
this time that she wished her to improve her opportunities and learn the
ways--the better ways, at least--of white people.
Mr. Hammond naturally looked at the commercial end of Wonota's
improvement. Nor did Ruth overlook the chance the Osage maid had of
becoming a money-earning star in the moving picture firmament. But she
desired to help the girl to something better than mere money.
Wonota responded to a marked degree to Ruth's efforts. She was naturally
refined. The Indian is not by nature coarse and crude. He is merely
different from the whites. Wonota seemed to select for herself, when she
had the opportunity, the better things obtainable--the better customs
of the whites rather than the ruder ones.
Meanwhile the work of preparing for the scenes of "Brighteyes" to be
shot in the canyon went on. The day came when all the company were
informed that the morrow would see the work begun. At daybreak, after a
hasty breakfast, the motors and vans and the cavalcade of riders left
the Clearwater station for a week--and that the last week of their
stay--up in the lovely canyon Ruth and her two girl chums had found.
"I do declare!" exclaimed the gay Jennie (even the lack of letters from
Henri Marchand could not quench her spirits for long), "this bunch of
tourists does look like an old-time emigrant train. We might be
following the Santa Fe Trail, all so merrily."
"Only there were no motor-cars in those old days," remarked Ruth.
"Nor portable stoves," put in Helen with a smile.
"And I am quite sure," suggested Mr. Hammond, who heard this, "that no
moving picture cameras went along with the old Santa Fe Trailers."
"Yet," said Ruth thoughtfully, "the country about here, at any rate, is
just about as wild as it was in those old days. And perhaps some of the
people are quite as savage as they were in the old days. Oh, dear!"
"Who are you worrying about? William?" asked Helen slyly. "He did sound
savage this morning when he was harnessing those mules to the big
wagon."
But her chum did not reply to this pleasantry. She really had something
on her mind which bothered her. But she did not explain the cause of her
anxiety to the others, even after the arrival of the party in the
canyon.
It looked like a great Gypsy camp when the party was settled on the
sward beside the mountain stream. Mr. Hooley had not seen the location
before, and he was somewhat critical of some points. But finally he
admitted that, unless the place had been built for their need, they
could not really expect to find a location better fitted.
"And thank goodness!" Ruth sighed, when the camera points were severally
decided upon, "after these shots are taken we can head East for good."
"Why, Ruthie! I thought we were having a dandy time," exclaimed Helen.
"Have you lost your old love for the wild and open places?"
"I certainly will be glad to see a porcelain bathtub again," yawned
Jennie, breaking in. "I don't really feel as though a sponge-down in an
icy cold brook with a tarpaulin around one for a bath-house is
altogether the height of luxury."
"It is out here," laughed Helen.
"I do not mind the inconveniences so much," said Ruth reflectively. "The
old Red Mill farmhouse was not very conveniently arranged--above stairs,
at least--until I had it built over at my own expense, greatly to Uncle
Jabez's opposition. It is not the roughing it. That is good for us I
verily believe. But I have a depressing feeling that before the picture
is done something may happen."
"I should expect it would!" cried Helen, not at all disturbed by the
prophecy. Once Helen had prophesied disaster, and it had come. But she
forgot that now. "I expect something to happen--every day, most likely.
But of course it will be a pleasant and exciting something. Yes,
indeedy!"
Neither of her friends, after all, realized that Ruth Fielding was
actually in fear. She was very anxious every waking moment. That strange
man whom the girls had spied here in the canyon might be a perfectly
harmless person. And then again--
Two days were occupied in placing the paraphernalia and training the
actors in their parts. They all got a working knowledge of what was
expected of them when the picture was being photographed, and the
principals learned their lines. For nowadays almost as much care is
given to what is said by actors before the camera as by those having
speaking parts upon the stage.
The big scene--the really big scene in the drama--was set upon that
overhanging lip of rock that Ruth had spied when first she, with Helen
and Jennie, had ridden up the trail. On that overhanging shelf occurred
the struggle between the white lover of _Brighteyes_ and the Indian who
had trailed him and the girl to this wild spot.
Mr. Grand, in spite of Wonota's scorn of him, was a handsome man and
made as fine an appearance in the out-of-door garments the part called
for as he did in the dress-suit to which he was so much addicted. The
Indian who played the part of the villain was an excellent actor and had
appeared many times on the silver sheet. He was earnest in his desire to
please the director, but he failed sometimes to "keep in the picture"
when he was not actually dominating a scene.
Because of this failing in John Onehorse, Mr. Hooley sent Ruth to the
top of the rock to watch and advise Onehorse as the scene proceeded.
She was quite able by this time to act as assistant director. Indeed, it
was Ruth's ambition to direct a picture of her own in the near future.
She sometimes had ideas that conflicted with those of Mr. Hammond and
his directors, and she wished to try her own way to get certain
results.
Now, however, she was to follow Mr. Hooley's instructions exactly.
The arrangement of the cameras were such, both from below and at the
level of the scene to be shot, that Ruth had to stand upon a narrow
shelf quite out of sight of the actors on the overhanging rock, and
hidden as well from most of the people below. This, to make sure that
she was out of the line of the camera.
Behind her the narrow and broken trail led to the top of the canyon
wall. It was up this trail that Jennie and Helen had seen the "Man
Friday" disappear on the occasion of their first visit to the place.
Patiently, over and over again, Mr. Hooley had the principal characters
try the scene. Below, Wonota, as the heroine, was to run into the camera
field at a certain point in the struggle of the two men on the lip of
rock. To time the Indian girl's entrance was no small task. But at last
the characters seemed to be about letter perfect.
"Look out now! We're going to shoot it!" shouted Jim Hooley through his
megaphone. "Miss Fielding! Keep your eye on Onehorse. Keep him up to the
mark while he waits for Mr. Grand's speech. Now! Ready?"
It was at just this moment that Ruth felt something--something hard and
painful--pressing between her shoulder-blades. She shot a glance over
her shoulder to see the ugly face of Dakota Joe Fenbrook peering out at
her between the walls of a narrow crack in the face of the cliff. The
thing he pressed against her was a long stick, and, with a grin of
menace, he drove that stick more firmly against Ruth's body!
"Ready? Camera! Go!" shouted Mr. Hooley, and the scene was on.
Ruth, with a stifled cry, realized that she was being pushed to the edge
of the steep path. There was a drop of twenty feet and more, and where
she stood there was no net to break the fall!
If Fenbrook pushed her over the brink of the path Ruth knew very well
that the outcome would be even too realistic for a moving picture.