Ruth Fielding Down East; Or, The Hermit of Beach Plum Point — Key Ideas to Explore

She did raise her eyes, however, at the querulous whistle of a striped creeper that was wriggling through the intertwined branches of the trumpet-vine in search of insects. Ruth Fielding was always interested in those busy, helpful little songsters.

"You cute little thing!" she murmured, at last catching sight of the flashing bird between the stems of the old vine. "I wish I could put _you_ into my scenario."

On the table at which she was sitting was a packet of typewritten sheets which she had been annotating, and two fat note books. She laid down her gold-mounted fountain pen as she uttered these words, and then sighed and pushed her chair back from the table.

Then she stood up suddenly. A sound had startled her. She looked all about the summer-house--a sharp, suspicious glance. Then she tiptoed to the door and peered out.

The creeper fluttered away. The robin continued to shout his warning. Had it really been a rustling in the vines she had heard? Was there somebody lurking about the summer-house?

She stepped out and looked on both sides. It was then she saw how threatening the aspect of the clouds on the other side of the river were. The sight drove from her thoughts for the moment the strange sound she had heard. She did not take pains to look beneath the summer-house on the water side.

Instead, another sound assailed her ears. This time one that she could not mistake for anything but just what it was--the musical horn of Tom Cameron's automobile. Ruth turned swiftly to look up the road. A dark maroon car, long and low-hung like a racer, was coming along the road, leaving a funnel of dust behind it. There were two people in the car.

The girl beside the driver--black-haired and petite--fluttered her handkerchief in greeting when she saw Ruth standing by the summer-house. At once the latter ran across the yard, over the gentle rise, and down to the front gate of the Potter farmhouse. She ran splendidly with a free stride of untrammeled limbs, but she held one shoulder rather stiffly.

The car was at the gate, and Tom brought it to a prompt stop. Helen, his twin sister, was out of it instantly and almost leaped into the bigger girl's arms.

"Oh! Oh! Oh!" sobbed Helen. "You _are_ alive after all that horrible experience coming home from Europe."

"And you are alive and safe, dear Helen," responded Ruth Fielding, quite as deeply moved.

It was the first time they had met since separating in Paris a month before. And in these times of war, with peace still an uncertainty, there were many perils to fear between the port of Brest and that of New York.

Tom, in uniform and with a ribbon and medal on his breast, grinned teasingly at the two girls.

"Come, come! Break away! Only twenty seconds allowed in a clinch. Don't Helen look fine, Ruth? How's the shoulder?"

"Just a bit stiff yet," replied the girl of the Red Mill, kissing her chum again.

At this moment the first sudden swoop of the tempest arrived. The tall elms writhed as though taken with St. Vitus's dance. The hens began to screech and run to cover. Thunder muttered in the distance.

"Oh, dear me!" gasped Ruth, paling unwontedly, for she was not by nature a nervous girl. "Come right into the house, Helen. You could not get to Cheslow or back home before this storm breaks. Put your car under the shed, Tom."

She dragged her friend into the yard and up the warped flag stones to the side door of the cottage. A little old woman who had been sitting on the porch in a low rocking chair arose with difficulty, leaning on a cane.

"Oh, my back, and oh, my bones!" murmured Aunt Alvirah Boggs, who was not long out of a sick bed herself and would never again be as "spry" as she once had been. "Do come in, dearies. It is a wind storm."

Ruth stopped to help the little old woman. She continued pale, but her thought for Aunt Alvirah's comfort caused her to put aside her own fear. The trio entered the house and closed the door.

In a moment there was a sharp patter against the house. The rain had begun in big drops. The rear door was opened, and Tom, laughing and shaking the water from his cap, dashed into the living room. He wore the insignia of a captain under his dust-coat and the distinguishing marks of a very famous division of the A. E. F.

"It's a buster!" he declared. "There's a paper sailing like a kite over the roof of the old mill----"

Ruth sprang up with a shriek. She ran to the back door by which Tom had just entered and tore it open.

"Oh, do shut the door, deary!" begged Aunt Alvirah. "That wind is 'nough to lift the roof."

"What _is_ the matter, Ruth?" demanded Helen.

But Tom ran out after her. He saw the girl leap from the porch and run madly down the path toward the summer-house. Back on the wind came a broken word or two of explanation:

"My papers! My scenario! The best thing I ever did, Tom!"

He had almost caught up to her when she reached the little pavilion. The wind from across the river was tearing through the summer-house at a sixty-mile-an-hour speed.

"Oh! It's gone!" Ruth cried, and had Tom not caught her she would have dropped to the ground.

There was not a scrap of paper left upon the table, nor anywhere in the place. Even the two fat notebooks had disappeared, and, too, the gold-mounted pen the girl of the Red Mill had been using. All, all seemed to have been swept out of the summer-house.

For half a minute Tom Cameron did not know just what to do for Ruth. Then the water spilled out of the angry clouds overhead and bade fair to drench them.

He half carried Ruth into the summer-house and let her rest upon a bench, sitting beside her with his arm tenderly supporting her shoulders. Ruth had begun to sob tempestuously.

Ruth Fielding weeping! She might have cried many times in the past, but almost always in secret. Tom, who knew her so well, had seen her in dangerous and fear-compelling situations, and she had not wept.

"What is it?" he demanded. "What have you lost?"

"My scenario! All my work gone!"

"The new story? My goodness, Ruth, it couldn't have blown away!"

"But it has!" she wailed. "Not a scrap of it left. My notebooks--my pen! Why!" and she suddenly controlled her sobs, for she was, after all, an eminently practical girl. "Could that fountain pen have been carried away by the windstorm, too?"

"There goes a barrel through the air," shouted Tom. "That's heavier than a fountain pen. Say, this is some wind!"

The sound of the dashing rain now almost drowned their voices. It sprayed them through the porous shelter of the vines and latticework so that they could not sit on the bench.

Ruth huddled upon the table with Tom Cameron standing between her and the drifting mist of the storm. She looked across the rain-drenched yard to the low-roofed house. She had first seen it with a home-hungry heart when a little girl and an orphan.

How many, many strange experiences she had had since that time, which seemed so long ago! Nor had she then dreamed, as "Ruth Fielding of the Red Mill," as the first volume of this series is called, that she would lead the eventful life she had since that hour.

Under the niggard care of miserly old Jabez Potter, the miller, her great uncle, tempered by the loving kindness of Aunt Alvirah Boggs, the miller's housekeeper, Ruth's prospects had been poor indeed. But Providence moves in mysterious ways. Seemingly unexpected chances had broadened Ruth's outlook on life and given her advantages that few girls in her sphere secure.

First she was enabled to go to a famous boarding school, Briarwood Hall, with her dearest chum, Helen Cameron. There she began to make friends and widen her experience by travel. With Helen, Tom, and other young friends, Ruth had adventures, as the titles of the series of books run, at Snow Camp, at Lighthouse Point, at Silver Ranch, on Cliff Island, at Sunrise Farm, with the Gypsies, in Moving Pictures, and Down in Dixie.

With the eleventh volume of the series Ruth and her chums, Helen Cameron and Jennie Stone, begin their life at Ardmore College. As freshmen their experiences are related in "Ruth Fielding at College; Or, The Missing Examination Papers." This volume is followed by "Ruth Fielding in the Saddle; Or, College Girls in the Land of Gold," wherein Ruth's first big scenario is produced by the Alectrion Film Corporation.

As was the fact with so many of our college boys and girls, the World War interfered most abruptly and terribly with Ruth's peaceful current of life. America went into the war and Ruth into Red Cross work almost simultaneously.

In "Ruth Fielding in the Red Cross; Or, Doing Her Bit for Uncle Sam," the Girl of the Red Mill gained a very practical experience in the work of the great peace organization which does so much to smooth the ravages of war. Then, in "Ruth Fielding at the War Front; Or, The Hunt for the Lost Soldier," the Red Cross worker was thrown into the very heart of the tremendous struggle, and in northern France achieved a name for courage that her college mates greatly envied.

Wounded and nerve-racked because of her experiences, Ruth was sent home, only to meet, as related in the fifteenth volume of the series, "Ruth Fielding Homeward Bound; Or, A Red Cross Worker's Ocean Perils," an experience which seemed at first to be disastrous. In the end, however, the girl reached the Red Mill in a physical and mental state which made any undue excitement almost a tragedy for her.

The mysterious disappearance of the moving picture scenario, which had been on her heart and mind for months and which she had finally brought, she believed, to a successful termination, actually shocked Ruth Fielding. She could not control herself for the moment.

Against Tom Cameron's uniformed shoulder she sobbed frankly. His arm stole around her.

"Don't take on so, Ruthie," he urged. "Of course we'll find it all. Wait till this rain stops----"

"It never blew away, Tom," she said.

"Why, of course it did!"

"No. The sheets of typewritten manuscript were fastened together with a big brass clip. Had they been lose and the wind taken them, we should have seen at least some of them flying about. And the notebooks!"

"And the pen?" murmured Tom, seeing the catastrophe now as she did. "Why, Ruthie! Could somebody have taken them all?"

"But who?" demanded the young fellow. "You have no enemies."

"Not here, I hope," she sighed. "I left them all behind."

He chuckled, although he was by no means unappreciative of the seriousness of her loss. "Surely that German aviator who dropped the bomb on you hasn't followed you here."

"Don't talk foolishly, Tom!" exclaimed the girl, getting back some of her usual good sense. "Of course, I have no enemy. But a thief is every honest person's enemy."

"Granted. But where is the thief around the Red Mill?"

"Can it be possible that your uncle or Ben saw the things here and rescued them just before the storm burst?"

"We will ask," she said, with a sigh. "But I can imagine no reason for either Uncle Jabez or Ben to come down here to the shore of the river. Oh, Tom! it is letting up."

"Good! I'll look around first of all. If there has been a skulker near----"

"Now, don't be rash," she cried.

"We're not behind the German lines now, Fraulein Mina von Brenner," and he laughed as he went out of the summer-house.

He did not smile when he was searching under the house and beating the brush clumps near by. He realized that this loss was a very serious matter for Ruth.

She was now independent of Uncle Jabez, but her income was partly derived from her moving picture royalties. During her war activities she had been unable to do much work, and Tom knew that Ruth had spent of her own means a great deal in the Red Cross work.

Ruth had refused to tell her friends the first thing about this new story for the screen. She believed it to be the very best thing she had ever originated, and she said she wished to surprise them all.

He even knew that all her notes and "before-the-finish" writing was in the notebooks that had now gone with the completed manuscript. It looked more than mysterious. It was suspicious.

Tom looked all around the summer-house. Of course, after this hard downpour it was impossible to mark any footsteps. Nor, indeed, did the raider need to leave such a trail in getting to and departing from the little vine-covered pavilion. The sward was heavy all about it save on the river side.

The young man found not a trace. Nor did he see a piece of paper anywhere. He was confident that Ruth's papers and notebooks and pen had been removed by some human agency. And it could not have been a friend who had done this thing.

"Didn't you find anything, Tom?" Ruth Fielding asked, as Helen's twin re-entered the summer-house.

His long automobile coat glistened with wet and his face was wind-blown. Tom Cameron's face, too, looked much older than it had--well, say a year before. He, like Ruth herself, had been through much in the war zone calculated to make him more sedate and serious than a college undergraduate is supposed to be.

"I did not see even a piece of paper blowing about," he told her.

"But before we came down from the house you said you saw a paper blow over the roof like a kite."

"That was an outspread newspaper. It was not a sheet of your manuscript."

"Then it all must have been stolen!" she cried.

"At least, human agency must have removed the things you left on this table," he said.

"Now, now, Ruth! It's tough, I know----"

But she recovered a measure of her composure almost immediately. Unnerved as she had first been by the disaster, she realized that to give way to her trouble would not do the least bit of good.

"An ordinary thief," Tom suggested after a moment, "would not consider your notes and the play of much value."

"I suppose not," she replied.

"If they are stolen it must be by somebody who understands--or thinks he does--the value of the work. Somebody who thinks he can sell a moving picture scenario."

"A gold mounted fountain pen would attract any petty thief," he went on to say. "But surely the itching fingers of such a person would not be tempted by that scenario."

"Then, which breed of thief stole my scenario, Tom?" she demanded. "You are no detective. Your deductions suggest two thieves."

"Humph! So they do. Maybe they run in pairs. But I can't really imagine two light-fingered people around the Red Mill at once. Seen any tramps lately?"

"We seldom see the usual tramp around here," said Ruth, shaking her head. "We are too far off the railroad line. And the Cheslow constables keep them moving if they land _there_."

"Could anybody have done it for a joke?" asked Tom suddenly.

"If they have," Ruth said, wiping her eyes, "it is the least like a joke of anything that ever happened to me. Why, Tom! I couldn't lay out that scenario again, and think of all the details, and get it just so, in a year!"

"I mean it! And even my notes are gone. Oh, dear! I'd never have the heart to write that scenario again. I don't know that I shall ever write another, anyway. I'm discouraged," sobbed the girl suddenly.

"Oh, Ruth! don't give way like this," he urged, with rather a boyish fear of a girl's tears.

"I've given way already," she choked. "I just feel that I'll never be able to put that scenario into shape again. And I'd written Mr. Hammond so enthusiastically about it."

"Oh! Then he knows all about it!" said Tom. "That is more than any of us do. You wouldn't tell us a thing."

"And I didn't tell him. He doesn't know the subject, or the title, or anything about it. I tell you, Tom, I had _such_ a good idea----"

"And you've got the idea yet, haven't you? Cheer up! Of course you can do it over."

"Suppose," demanded Ruth quickly, "this thief that has got my manuscript should offer it to some producer? Why! if I tried to rewrite it and bring it out, I might be accused of plagiarizing my own work."

"I wouldn't dare," said Ruth, shaking her head. "As long as I do not know what has become of the scenario and my notes, I will not dare use the idea at all. It is dreadful!"

The rain was now falling less torrentially. The tempest was passing. Soon there was even a rift in the clouds in the northwest where a patch of blue sky shone through "big enough to make a Scotchman a pair of breeches," as Aunt Alvirah would say.

"We'd better go up to the house," sighed Ruth.

"I'll go right around to the neighbors and see if anybody has noticed a stranger in the vicinity," Tom suggested.

"There's Ben! Do you suppose he has seen anybody?"

A lanky young man, his clothing gray with flour dust, came from the back door of the mill and hastened under the dripping trees to reach the porch of the farmhouse. He stood there, smiling broadly at them, as Ruth and Tom hurriedly crossed the yard.

"Good day, Mr. Tom," said Ben, the miller's helper. Then he saw Ruth's troubled countenance. "Wha--what's the matter, Ruthie?"

"Ben, I've lost something."

"Bless us an' save us, no!"

"Yes, I have. Something very valuable. It's been stolen."

"But I do! Some manuscript out of the summer-house yonder."

"And her gold-mounted fountain pen," added Tom. "That would tempt somebody."

Ben could express his simple wonderment in a variety of phrases. But he seemed unable to go beyond these explosive expressions.

"Ben, wake up!" exclaimed Ruth. "Have you any idea who would have taken it?"

"That gold pen, Ruthie? Why--why---- A thief!"

"Old man," said Tom with suppressed disgust, "you're a wonder. How did you guess it?"

"Hush, Tom," Ruth said. Then: "Now, Ben, just think. Who has been around here to-day? Any stranger, I mean."

"Why--I dunno," said the mill hand, puckering his brows.

"Think!" she commanded again.

"Why--why----old Jep Parloe drove up for a grinding."

"He's not a stranger."

"Oh, yes he is, Ruthie. Me nor Mr. Potter ain't seen him before for nigh three months. Your uncle up and said to him, 'Why, you're a stranger, Mr. Parloe.'"

"I mean," said Ruth, with patience, "anybody whom you have never seen before--or anybody whom you might suspect would steal."

"Well," drawled Ben stubbornly, "your uncle, Ruthie, says old Jep ain't any too honest."

"I know all about that," Ruth said. "But Parloe did not leave his team and go down to the summer-house, did he?"

"Did you see anybody go down that way?"

"Don't believe I did--savin' you yourself, Ruthie."

"I left a manuscript and my pen on the table there. I ran out to meet Tom and Helen when they came."

"I seen you," said Ben.

"Then it was just about that time that somebody sneaked into that summer-house and stole those things."

"I didn't see anybody snuck in there," declared Ben, with more confidence than good English.

"Say!" ejaculated Tom, impatiently, "haven't you seen any tramp, or straggler, or Gypsy--or anybody like that?"

"Hi gorry!" suddenly said Ben, "I do remember. There was a man along here this morning--a preacher, or something like that. Had a black frock coat on and wore his hair long and sort o' wavy. He was shabby enough to be a tramp, that's a fact. But he was a real knowledgeable feller--he was that. Stood at the mill door and recited po'try for us."

"Poetry!" exclaimed Tom.

"To you and Uncle Jabez?" asked Ruth.

"Uh-huh. All about 'to be or not to be a bean--that is the question.' And something about his having suffered from the slung shots and bow arrers of outrageous fortune--whatever that might be. I guess he got it all out of the Scriptures. Your uncle said he was bugs; but I reckoned he was a preacher."

"Jimminy!" muttered Tom. "A derelict actor, I bet. Sounds like a Shakespearean ham."