Freezeout Camp had awakened. Many of the old shacks and cabins had been
repaired and made habitable for the purposes of the moving picture
company. The largest dance hall--"The Palace of Pleasure" as it was
called on the film--was just as Flapjack Peters remembered it, back in an
earlier rush for placer gold to this spot.
Behind the rough bar, on the shelves, however, were only empty bottles,
or, at most, those filled with colored water. Mr. Hammond had been
careful to keep liquor out of the rejuvenated camp.
Flapjack Peters began to look like a different man. Whether it was his
enforced abstinence from drink, or the fact that he saw ahead the
possibility of wealth and the tall hat and white vest of which he had
dreamed, he walked erect and looked every man straight in the eye.
"It gets me!" said Min to Ruth Fielding. "Pop ain't looked like this
since I kin remember."
Two days of this excitement passed. The motion picture people "were
getting down to earth again," as Mr. Grimes said, and the girls were
beginning to expect Tom Cameron's return, when one noon the head of a
procession was seen advancing through the nearest pass in the mountain
range to the west. As Ruth and others watched, the procession began to
wind down into the shallow gorge where the long "petered-out" placer
diggings of Freezeout had been located, and where the rejuvenated town
itself still stood.
"What under the sun can these people want?" gasped Mr. Hammond, the
president of the film-making company, to Ruth.
The girl of the Red Mill was in riding habit and she had her pony near
at hand. "I'll ride up and see," she said.
But the instant she had sighted the first group of hurrying riders and
the first wagon, she believed she understood. Word of the "strike" at
the old camp had in some way become noised abroad.
Before Edith Phelps and the men she was to hire, with the Kingman
lawyer's aid, reached the ledge her brother had located, other people
had heard the news. These were the first of "the gold rush."
She spurred her horse up into the pass and ran the pony half a mile
before she turned him and raced back to Mr. Hammond. She came with
flying hair and rosy cheeks to the worried president, bursting with an
idea that had assailed her mind.
"Mr. Hammond! It is the greatest sight you ever saw! Get the camera man
and hurry right up there to the mouth of the pass. Tell Mr. Grimes----"
"What do you mean?" snapped the president of the Alectrion Film
Corporation. "Do you want to disorganize my whole company again?"
"I want to show you the greatest moving picture that ever was taken!"
cried the girl of the Red Mill. "Oh, Mr. Hammond, you _must_ take it! It
must be incorporated in this film. Why! _it is the real thing!_"
"What is that? A joke?" he growled.
"No joke at all, I assure you," said Ruth, patiently. "You can see them
coming through the pass--and beyond--for miles and miles. Men afoot, on
horseback, in all kinds of wagons, on burros--oh, it is simply great!
There are hundreds and hundreds of them. Why, Mr. Hammond! this
Freezeout Camp is going to be a city before night!"
The chief reason why Mr. Hammond was a wealthy man and one of the powers
in the motion picture world was because he could seize upon a new idea
and appreciate its value in a moment. He knew that Ruth was a sane girl
and that she had judgment, as well as imagination. He gaped at her for a
moment, perhaps; the next he was shouting for Mr. Grimes, for the camera
men, for the horse wrangler, and for the "call-boy" to round up the
company.
In half an hour a train set out for the pass, which met the first of the
advance guard of gold seekers pouring down into the valley. The
eager-faced men of all ages and apparently of all walks in life hurried
on almost silently toward the spot where they were told a ledge of free
gold had been found.
There were roughly dressed teamsters, herdsmen, nondescripts; there were
Mexicans and Indians; there were well dressed city men--lawyers, doctors,
other professional men, perhaps. Afterward Ruth read in an Arizona
newspaper that such a typical stampede to any new-found gold or silver
strike had not been seen in a decade.
A camera man set up his machine in a good spot and waited for the whole
film company to drift along into the pass and join the real gold seekers
that streamed down toward Freezeout.
This idea of Ruth Fielding's was the crowning achievement of her work on
this film. The company came back to the cabins at evening, wearied and
dust-choked, to find, as Ruth had prophesied, a veritable city on and
near the creek.
The newcomers had rushed into the hills and staked out their claims,
some of them on the very fringe of the valley out of which the
gold-bearing ledge rose. Of course, many of these claims would be
worthless.
A lively buying and selling of the more worthless claims was already
under way. With the stampede had come storekeepers and wagons of
foodstuffs.
That night nobody slept. Mr. Hammond, realizing what this really meant,
but feeling none of the itch for digging gold that most of those on the
spot experienced, organized a local constabulary. A justice of the peace
was found with intelligence enough, and enough knowledge of the state
ordinance, to act as magistrate.
The men were called together early in the morning in the biggest dance
hall and the vast majority--indeed, it was almost unanimous--voted that
liquor selling be tabooed at Freezeout.
Several men of unsavory reputations who had come, like buzzards scenting
the carrion from afar, were advised to leave town and stay away. They
met other men of their stripe on the trail from Handy Gulch and other
such places, and reported that Freezeout was going to be run "on a
Sunday-school basis"; there was nothing in it for the usual birds of
prey that infest such camps.
In a few hours the party coming from Kingman with Edith Phelps and the
lawyer she had engaged, arrived. The camp about the ridge grew and
expanded in every direction. Most of the claimholders slept on their
claims, fearing trickery. Shafts were sunk. The Phelps crowd began to
set up a small crusher and cyaniding plant that had been trucked over
the trails.
The moving picture was finished at last, before either Mr. Grimes or Mr.
Hammond quite lost their minds. Several of the men of the company broke
their contract with the Alectrion Film Corporation and would remain at
the diggings. They believed their claims were valuable.
Tom had returned before this with reports from the assayer and copies of
the filing of the claims. The specimen from Ruth's claim showed one
hundred and eighty dollars to the ton. The ore from Flapjack Peters and
Min's claims were, after all, the richest of any of their party, though
farther down the ledge. The ore taken from those claims showed two
hundred dollars to the ton.
"We're rich--or we're goin' to be," Min declared to the Ardmore girls and
Miss Cullam, the last night the Eastern visitors were to remain in
Freezeout. "That lawyer of R'yal Phelps is goin' to let pop have some
money and we're both goin' to send for clo'es--some duds! Wish you could
wait and see me togged up just like a Fourth o' July pony in the
parade."
"I wish we could, Min!" cried Jennie Stone.
"You shall come East to visit me later," Ruth declared. "Won't you, Min?
We'll all show you a good time there."
"As though you hadn't showed me the best time I ever had already,"
choked the Yucca girl. "But I'll come--after I git used to my new
clo'es."
"Have you and your father really made a bargain with Royal Phelps?" Miss
Cullam asked, as much interested in the welfare of the suddenly enriched
girl as her pupils.
"Yes, Ma'am. Pop's going to have an office in the new company, too. And
Mr. Phelps is goin' to git backin' from the East and buy up all the
adjoinin' claims that he can."
"He'll have all ours, in time," said Helen. "That's lots better than
each of us trying to develop her little claim. Oh, that Phelps man is
smart."
"And what about Edith?" demanded the honest Ruth. "We've got to praise
her, too."
There was silence. Finally, Miss Cullam said dryly: "She seems to have
no very enthusiastic friends in the audience, Miss Fielding."
"Oh, well," Ruth said, laughing, "we none of us like Edith."
"How about liking her brother?" asked Jennie Stone, and she seemed to
say it pointedly.