CHAPTER XV
AN AMAZING SITUATION
“‘Ghost’?” cried Ruth Fielding. “Let me see it! Remember the campus ghost back at old Briarwood, Helen? I haven’t seen a ghost since that time.”
“Ugh! Get this big elephant off of me!” grunted her chum, impolitely as well as angrily. “She’s no ghost, I do assure you. She’s of the earth, earthy, and no mistake! Ouch! Get off, Heavy!”
“Oh! Oh! Oh!” groaned the plump girl. “I—I saw them. Three of them!”
“Sounds like a three-ring circus,” snapped Helen.
But Ruth was peering through the window. She saw nothing, and complained thereof:
“Jen has had a nightmare. I don’t see a thing.”
“Nightmare, your granny!” sputtered the plump girl, finally rolling off her half crushed friend. “I saw it—them—those!”
“Your grammar is so mixed I wouldn’t believe you on oath,” declared Helen, getting to her own bare feet and paddling back to her cot for slippers and a negligee.
“O-o-oh, it is chilly,” agreed Ruth, grabbing a wrap, too.
“Do tell us about it, Jennie,” she begged. “Did you see your ghost through the window here?”
“It isn’t my ghost!” denied the plump girl. “I’m alive, ain’t I?”
“But you’re not conscious,” grumbled Helen.
“I can see!” wailed Jennie. “I haven’t lost my eyesight.”
“Stop!” Ruth urged. “Let us get at the foundation of this trouble. You say you saw——”
“I saw what I saw!”
“Oh, see-saw!” cried Helen. “We’re all loony, now.”
Ruth was about to ask another question, but she was again looking through the window. She suddenly bit off a cry of her own. She had to confess that the sight she saw was startling.
“Is—is that the ghost, Jennie?” she breathed, seizing the plump girl by her arm and dragging her forward.
Jennie gave one frightened look through the window and immediately clapped her palms over her eyes.
“Ow!” she wailed in muffled tones. “They’re coming back.”
They were, indeed! Three white figures in Indian file came stalking up the long dock. They approached the camp in a spectral procession and had she been awakened to see them first of all, Ruth might have been startled herself.
Helen peered over her chum’s shoulder and in teeth-chattering monotone breathed in Ruth’s ear the query:
“What is it?”
“It—it’s Heavy’s ghost.”
“Not mine! Not mine!” denied the plump girl.
“Oh!” gasped Helen, spying the stalking white figures.
It was the moonlight made them appear so ghostly. Ruth knew that, of course, at once. And then——
“Who ever saw ghosts carrying garbage cans before?” ejaculated the girl of the Red Mill. “Mercy me, Heavy! do stop your wailing. It is the chef and his two assistants who have got up to dump the garbage on the out-going tide. What a perfect scare-cat you are!”
“You don’t mean it, Ruth?” whimpered the plump girl. “Is that all they were?”
Helen began to giggle. And it covered her own fright. Ruth was rather annoyed.
“If you had remained in bed and minded your own business,” she said to Jennie, “you would not have seen ghosts, or got us up to see them. Now go back to sleep and behave yourself.”
“Yes, ma’am,” murmured the abashed Jennie Stone. “How silly of me! I was never afraid of a cook before—no, indeed.”
Helen continued to giggle spasmodically; but she fell asleep soon. As for Jennie, she began to breathe heavily almost as soon as her head touched the pillow. But Ruth must needs lie awake for hours, and naturally the teeth of her mind began to knaw at the problem of that bit of paper she had found in the sand.
The more she thought of it the less easy it was to discard the idea that the writing on the paper was a quotation from her own scenario script. It seemed utterly improbable that two people should use that same expression as a “flash” in a scenario.
Yet, if this paper was a connecting link between her stolen manuscript and the thief, who was the thief?
It would seem, of course, if this supposition were granted, that some member of the company of film actors Mr. Hammond had there at Beach Plum Point had stolen the scenario. At least, the stolen scenario must be in the possession of some member of the company.
Who could it be? Naturally Ruth considered this unknown must be one of the company who wished Mr. Hammond to accept and produce a scenario.
Ruth finally fell into a troubled sleep with the determination in her mind to take more interest in the proposed scenario-writing contest than she had at first intended.
She could not imagine how anybody could take her work and change it so that she would not recognize it! The plot of the story was too well wrought and the working out of it too direct.
She did not think that she had it perfect. Only that she had perfected the idea as well as she was able. But changing it would not hide from her the recognition of her own brain-child.
So after breakfast she went to Mr. Hammond to make inquiry about the scenario contest.
“Ha, ha! So you are coming to yourself, Miss Ruth!” he chuckled. “I told you you would feel different. I only wish you would get a real smart idea for a picture.”
“Nothing like that!” she told him, shaking her head. “I could not think of writing a new scenario. You don’t know what it means to me—the loss of that picture I had struggled so long with and thought so much about. I——
“But let us not talk of it,” she hastened to add. “I am curious regarding the stories that have been offered to you.”
“You need not fear competition,” he replied. “Just as I told you, all these perfectly good acting people base their scenarios on dramas they have played or seen played. They haven’t got the idea of writing for the screen at all, although they work before the camera.”
“And that is no wonder!” exclaimed Ruth. “The way the directors take scenes, the actors never get much of an idea of the continuity of the story they are making. But these stories?”
“So far, I haven’t found a possible scenario. And I have looked at more than a score.”
“You don’t mean it!”
“I most certainly do,” he assured her. “Want to look at them?”
“Why—yes,” confessed Ruth. “I am curious, as I tell you.”
“Go to it!” exclaimed Mr. Hammond, opening a drawer of his desk and pointing to the pile of manuscripts within. “Consider yourself at home here. I am going over to the port with Director Hooley and most of the members of the company. We have found just the location for the shooting of that scene in your ‘Seaside Idyl’ where the ladies’ aid society holds its ‘gossip session’ in the grove—remember?”
“Oh, yes,” Ruth replied, not much interested, as she took the first scenario out of the drawer.
“And Hooley’s found some splendid types, too, around the village. They really have a sewing circle connected with the Herringport Union Church, and I have agreed to help the ladies pay for having the church edifice painted if they will let us film a session of the society with our principal character actors mixed in with the local group. The sun is good to-day.”
He went away, and a little later Ruth heard the automobiles start for Herringport. She had the forenoon to herself, for the rest of her party had gone out in a motor boat fishing—a party from which she had excused herself.
Eagerly she began to examine the scenarios submitted to Mr. Hammond. The possibility that she might find one of them near enough like her own lost story to suggest that it had been plagiarized, made Ruth’s heart beat faster.
She could not forget the quotation on the scrap of brown paper. Somebody on this Point—and it seemed that the “somebody” must be one of the moving picture company—had written that quotation from her scenario. She felt that this could not be denied.