Peters was still struggling with his captors and talking wildly. He
evidently did not know his own daughter.
"Well, what you goin' to do with him?" demanded Bob, the pipeman. "We
ain't expected to stand and hold him all day, if we ain't goin' to be
'lowed to hang him--the ornery critter!"
"You shet up, Bob Davis!" said Min. "You ain't no pulin' infant yourself
when you're drunk, and you know it."
The other men began laughing at the angry miner, and Bob admitted:
"Well, s'posin' that's so? I'm sober now. And I got work to do. So's
these other fellows. What you want done with Flapjack?"
Ruth Fielding was so deeply interested for Min's sake that she could not
help interfering.
"Oh, Min, isn't there a doctor in this camp?"
"Yes'm. Doc Quibbly. He's here, ain't he, boys?"
"The old doc's down to his office in the tin shack beyant the hotel,"
said one. "I seen him not an hour ago."
"Let's take your father to the hotel, Min," Ruth said. "These men will
help us, I know. So will Tom Cameron. We will have the doctor look after
your father."
"The old doc can dope him a-plenty, I reckon," said Bob.
"Sure we'll help you," said the rough fellows, who were not really
hard-hearted after all.
"I dunno's they'll let him into the hotel," Min said.
"Yes they will. We'll pay for his room and you and the doctor can look
out for him," Ruth declared.
"You are good and helpful, Ruth Fielding," said Miss Cullam, coming
forward, much as she despised the condition of the man, Peters. "How
terrible! But one must be sorry for that poor girl."
"And Min has pluck all right!" cried Jennie Stone, admiringly. "We must
help her."
They were all agreed in this. Even Rebecca and Miss Cullam, who both
shrank from the coarseness of the men and the roughness of Min and her
father, commiserated the man's misfortune and were sorry for Min's
strait.
Tom assisted in leading the wildly-talking Peters to the hotel. Ruth and
Miss Cullam hurried on in advance to engage a room for the man whom they
assured the proprietor was really ill. Min, meanwhile, went in search of
the camp's medical practitioner.
Dr. Quibbly was a gray-bearded man with keen eyes but palsied hands. He
had plainly been wrecked by misfortune or some disease; but he had been
left with all his mental powers unimpaired.
He took hold of the distraught Peters in a capable manner; and Tom, who
remained to help nurse the patient, declared to Ruth and Helen that he
never hoped to see a doctor who knew his business better than Dr.
Quibbly knew it.
"He had Peters quiet in half an hour. No harmful drug, either. Told me
everything he used. Says rest, and milk and eggs to build up the
stomach, is all the chap needs. Min's with him now and I'm going to
sleep in my blanket outside the door to-night, so if she needs anybody
I'll be within call."
It had been rather an exciting experience for the girls and they
remained in their rooms for the rest of the day. The hotel proprietor
offered to take them around at night and "show them the sights"; but as
that meant visiting the two saloons and gambling halls, Miss Cullam
refused for the party, rather tartly.
"No offence meant, Ma'am," said the hotel man, Mr. Bennett. "But most of
the tenderfeet that come here hanker to 'go slumming,' as they call it.
They want to see these here miners at their amusements, as well as at
their daily occupations."
"I'd rather see them at church," Miss Cullam told him frankly. "I think
they need it."
"Good glory, Ma'am!" exclaimed the man. "We git that, too--once a month.
What more kin you expect?"
"I suppose," Miss Cullam said to her girls, "that a perfectly
straight-laced New England old maid could not be set down in a more
inappropriate place than a mining camp."
The speech gave Ruth a suggestion for a scene in the picture play of
"The Forty-Niners," and she would have been delighted to have the
Ardmore teacher play a part in that scene.
"However," she said to Helen, whispering it over in bed that night, "it
will be funny. I know Mr. Hammond will bring plenty of costumes of the
period of forty-nine, for he wants women in the show. And there will be
some character actress who can take the part of an unsophisticated blue
stocking from the Hub, who arrives at the camp in the midst of the
miner's revelry."
"Oh, my!" gasped Helen. "Miss Cullam will think you are making fun of
her."
"No she won't----the dear thing! She has too much good sense. But she
_has_ given me what Tom would call a dandy idea."
"Isn't it nice to have Tom--or somebody--to lay our use of slang to?" said
Ruth's chum demurely.
The party did not leave Handy Gulch the next day, nor the day following.
There were several excuses given for this delay and they were all good.
One of the ponies had developed lameness; and a burro wandered away and
Pedro had to spend half a day searching for him. Perhaps the Mexican lad
would have been quicker about this had Min been on hand to hurry him.
But having been close beside her father all night she lay down for
needed sleep while Tom Cameron and the doctor took her place.
The report from the sickroom was favorable. In a few hours the man who
had come so near to bringing about a tragedy in Handy Gulch would be fit
to travel. Ruth declared that she would wait for him, and he should go
along with the party to Freezeout.
"But you are our guide and general factotum, Min. We depend on you," she
told the sick man's daughter.
"I dunno what that thing is you called me; but I guess it ain't a bad
name," said Min Peters. "If you'll jest let pop trail along so's I kin
watch him he'll be as good as pie, I know."
Then, there was Miss Cullam's reason for not wishing to start. She said
she was "saddle sick."
"I have been seasick, and trainsick; but I think saddlesick must be the
worst, for it lasts longer. I can lie in bed now," said the poor woman,
"and feel myself wabbling just as I do in that hateful saddle.
"Oh, dear, me, Ruthie Fielding! I wish I had never agreed to come
without demanding a comfortable carriage."
"They tell me that there are places on the trail before we get to
Freezeout so narrow that a carriage can't be used. The wagons are going
miles and miles around so as to escape the rough places of the
straighter trail."
"Goodness!" exclaimed Miss Cullam in disgust. "Is it necessary to get to
Freezeout Camp in such a short time? I tell you right now: I am going to
rest in bed for two days."
And she did. The girls were not worried, however. They found plenty to
see and to do about the mining town. As for Ruth, she set to work on her
scenario, and kept Rebecca Frayne busy with the typewriter, too. She
sketched out the scene she had mentioned to Helen, and it was so funny
that Rebecca giggled all the time she was typewriting it.
"Goodness!" murmured Ruth. "I hope the audiences will think it is as
funny as you do. The only trouble is, unless a good deal of the
conversation is thrown on the screen, they will miss some of the best
points. Dear me! Such is fate. I was born to be a humorist--a real
humorist--in a day and age when 'custard-pie comedians' have the
right-of-way."
The third day the party started bright and early on the Freezeout trail.
Flapjack Peters was well enough to ride; and he was woefully sorry for
what he had done. But he was still too much "twisted" in his mind to be
able to tell Ruth just how he came to start away from Yucca with Edith
Phelps and Ann Hicks, instead of waiting for the entire party to arrive.
Ann had told all she knew about it at her meeting with Ruth. It remained
a mystery why Edith had come to Yucca; why she had kept Ann and her
friends apart; and why at Handy Gulch she had abandoned both Ann and
Flapjack Peters.
"She met a man here, that's all I know," said Ann, with disgust.
"Maybe it was the man who wrote her from Yucca," said Helen to Ruth.
"'Box twenty-four, R. F. D., Yucca, Arizona,'" murmured Ruth. "We should
have made inquiries in Yucca about the person who has his mail come to
that postbox."
"These hindsights that should have been foresights are the limit!"
groaned Helen. "We must admit that Edie Phelps has put one over on us.
But what it is she has done _I_ do not comprehend."
"That is what bothers me," Ruth said, shaking her head.
They set off on this day from the Gulch in a spirit of cheerfulness, and
ready for any adventure. However, none of the party--not a soul of
it--really expected what did happen before the end of the day.
As usual the pony cavalcade got ahead of the burros in the forenoon. The
little animals would go only so fast no matter what was done to them.
"You could put a stick of dynamite under one o' them critters," Min
said, "and he'd rise slow-like. 'Hurry up' ain't knowed to the burros'
language--believe me!"
The pony cavalcade was halted most surprisingly about noon, and in a way
which bid fair to delay the party until the burros caught up, if not
longer. They had got well into the hills. The cliffs rose on either hand
to towering heights. Thick and scrubby woods masked the sides of the
gorge through which they rode.
"It is as wild as one could imagine," said Miss Cullam, riding with Tom
in the lead. "What do you suppose is the matter with my pony, Mr.
Cameron?"
Tom had begun to be puzzled about his own mount--a wise old, flea-bitten
gray. The ponies had pricked their ears forward and were snuffing the
air as though there was some unpleasant odor assailing their nostrils.
"I don't know just what is the matter," Tom confessed. "But these
creatures can see and smell a lot that _we_ can't, Miss Cullam. Perhaps
we had better halt and----"
He got no further. They were just rounding an elbow in the trail. There
before them, rising up on their haunches in the path, were three gray
and black bears!
"Ow-yow!" shrieked Jennie Stone. "Do you girls see the same things _I_
do?"
To those ahead, however, it seemed no matter for laughter. The
bears--evidently a female with two cubs--were too close for fun-making.