CHAPTER XIV
A QUOTATION
“Do help him, Tom!” cried Ruth Fielding, and she started for the spot where the man and the skiff were sinking.
Tom cast aside his sweater, kicked his sneakers off, and plunged into the tide. Ruth was quite as lightly dressed as Tom; but she saw that he could do all that was necessary.
That was, to bring the frightened man ashore. This “hermit” as they called him, was certainly very much afraid of the water.
He splashed a good deal, and Tom had to speak sharply to keep him from getting a strangle-hold about his own neck.
“Jimminy! but that was a mean trick,” panted Tom, when he got ashore with the fisherman. “Somebody pulled the plug out of the bottom of the skiff and first he knew, he was going down.”
“It is a shame,” agreed Ruth, looking at the victim of the joke curiously.
He was a thin-featured, austere looking man, scrupulously shaven, but with rather long hair that had quite evidently been dyed. Now that it was plastered to his crown by the salt water (for he had been completely immersed more than once in his struggle with Tom Cameron) his hair was shown to be quite thin and of a greenish tinge at the roots.
The shock of being dipped in the sea so unexpectedly was plainly no small one for the hermit. He stood quite unsteadily on the strand, panting and sputtering.
“Young dogs! No respect for age and ability in this generation. I might have been drowned.”
“Well, it’s all over now,” said Tom comfortingly. “Where do you live?”
“Over yonder, young man,” replied the hermit, pointing to the ocean side of the point.
“We will take you home. You lie down for a while and you will feel better,” Ruth said soothingly. “We will come back here afterward and get your skiff ashore.”
“Thank you, Miss,” said the man courteously.
“I’ll make those fellows who played the trick on you get the boat ashore,” promised Tom, running for his shoes and sweater.
The hermit proved to be a very uncommunicative person. Ruth tried to get him to talk about himself as they crossed the rocky spit, but all that he said of a personal nature was that his name was “John.”
His shack was certainly a lonely looking hovel. It faced the tumbling Atlantic and it seemed rather an odd thing to Ruth that a man who was so afraid of the sea should have selected such a spot for his home.
The hermit did not invite them to enter his abode. He promised Ruth that he would make a hot drink for himself and remove his wet garments and lie down. But he only seemed moderately grateful for their assistance, and shut the door of the shack promptly in their faces when he got inside.
“Just as friendly as a sore-headed dog,” remarked Tom, as they went back to the bay side of the Point.
“Perhaps the others have played so many tricks on him that he is suspicious of even our assistance,” Ruth said.
Thus speaking, she stooped to pick up a bit of paper in the path. It had been half covered by the sand and might have lain there a long time, or only a day.
Just why this bit of brown wrapping paper had caught her attention, it would be hard to say. Ruth might have passed it a dozen times without noticing it.
But now she must needs turn the paper over and over in her hands as she watched Tom, with the help of the rather abashed practical jokers, haul the water-logged skiff ashore.
She had forgotten the fishing poles they had abandoned on the rocks, and sat down upon a boulder. Suddenly she discovered that there was writing on the bit of paper she had picked up. It was then that her attention really became fixed upon her find.
The characters had been written with an indelible pencil. The dampness had only blurred the writing instead of erasing it. Her attention thus engaged, she idly scrutinized more than the blurred lines. Her attitude as she sat there on the boulder slowly stiffened; her gaze focused upon the paper.
“Why! what is it?” she murmured at last.
The blurred lines became clearer to her vision. It was the wording of the phrase rather than the handwriting that enthralled her. This that follows was all that was written on the paper:
“Flash:—
“As in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be——”
To the ordinary observer, with no knowledge of what went before or followed this quotation, the phrase must seem idle. But the word “flash” is used by scenario writers and motion picture makers, indicating an explanatory phrase thrown on the screen.
And this quoted phrase struck poignantly to Ruth Fielding’s mind. For it was one she had used in that last scenario—the one that had so strangely disappeared from the summer-house back at the Red Mill!
Amazed—almost stunned—by this discovery, she sat on the boulder scarcely seeing what Tom and the others were doing toward salvaging the old hermit’s skiff and other property.
Thoughts regarding the quotation shuttled back and forth in the girl’s mind in a most bewildering way. The practical side of her character pointed out that there really could be no significance in this discovery. It could not possibly have anything to do with her stolen script.
Yet the odd phrase, used in just this way, had been one of the few “flashes” indicated in her scenario. Was it likely that anybody else, writing a picture, would use just that phrase?
She balanced the improbability of this find meaning anything at all to her against the coincidence of another author using the quotation in writing a scenario. She did not know what to think. Which supposition was the more improbable?
The thought was preposterous that the paper should mean anything to her. Ruth was about to throw it away; and then, failing to convince herself that the quotation was but idly written, she tucked the piece of paper into the belt of her bathing suit.
When Tom was ready to go back to their fishing station, Ruth went with him and said nothing about the find she had made.
They had fair luck, all told, and the chef at the camp produced their catch in a dish of boiled tautog with egg sauce at dinner that evening. The company ate together at a long table, like a logging camp crew, only with many more of the refinements of life than the usual logging crew enjoys. It was, however, on a picnic plane of existence, and there was much hilarity.
These actor folk were very pleasant people. Even the star, Miss Loder, was quite unspoiled by her success.
“You know,” she confessed to Ruth (everybody confided in Ruth), “I never would have been anything more than a stock actress in some jerkwater town, as we say in the West, if the movies hadn’t become so popular. I have what they call the ‘appealing face’ and I can squeeze out real tears at the proper juncture. Those are two very necessary attributes for a girl who wishes to gain film success.”
“But you can really act,” Ruth said honestly. “I watched you to-day.”
“I should be able to act. I come of a family who have been actors for generations. Acting is like breathing to me. But, of course, it is another art to ‘register’ emotion in the face, and very different from displaying one’s feelings by action and audible expression. You know, one of our most popular present-day stage actresses got her start by an ability to scream off-stage. Nothing like that in the movies.”
“You should hear Jennie Stone with a black ant down her back,” put in Helen, with serious face. “I am sure Heavy could go the actress you speak of one better, and become even more popular.”
“I am not to be blamed if I squeal at crawly things,” sniffed the plump girl, hearing this. “See how brave I am in most other respects.”
But that night Jennie exhibited what Tom called her “scarefulness” in most unmistakable fashion, and never again could she claim to be brave. She gave her chums in addition such a fright that they were not soon over talking about it.
The three college girls had cots in a small shack that Mr. Hammond had given up to their use. It was one of the shacks nearest the shore of the harbor. Several boat-docks near by ran out into the deep water.
It was past midnight when Jennie was for some reason aroused. Usually she slept straight through the night, and had to be awakened by violent means in time for breakfast.
She was not startled, but awoke naturally, and found herself broad awake. She sat up in her cot, almost convinced that it must be daylight. But it was the moon shining through a haze of clouds that lighted the interior of the shack. The other two girls were breathing deeply. The noises she heard did not at first alarm Jennie.
There was the whisper of the tide as it rolled the tiny pebbles and shells up the strand and, receding, swept them down again. It chuckled, too, among the small piers of the near-by docks.
Then the listening girl heard footsteps—or what she took to be that sound. They approached the shack, then receded. She began to be curious, then felt a tremor of alarm. Who could be wandering about the camp at this grim hour of the night?
She was unwise enough to allow her imagination to wake up, too. She stole from her bed and peered out of the screened window that faced the water. Almost at once a moving object met her frightened gaze.
It was a figure all in white which seemed to float down the lane between the tents and out upon the nearest boat-dock.
Afterward Jennie declared she could have suffered one of these spirit-looking manifestations in silence. She crammed the strings of her frilled nightcap between her teeth as a stopper!
This spectral figure was going away from the shack, anyway. It appeared to be bearing something in its arms. But then came a second ghost, likewise burdened. Gasping, Jennie waited, clinging to the window-sill for support.
A third spectre appeared, rising like Banquo’s spirit at Macbeth’s feast. This was too much for the plump girl’s self-control. She opened her mouth, and her half-strangled shriek, the partially masticated cap-strings all but choking her, aroused Ruth and Helen to palpitating fright.
“Oh! What is it?” demanded Helen, bounding out of bed.
“Ghosts! Oh! Waw!” gurgled Jennie, and sank back into her friend’s arms.
Helen was literally as well as mentally overcome. Jennie’s weight carried her to the straw matting with a bump that shook the shack and brought Ruth, too, out of bed.