BILBY
The old, shingled Red Mill, which Jabez Potter had revamped each spring with mineral paint, was as brilliant a landmark on the bank of the Lumano River as ever it had been. In fact, it seemed as though Ben, the hired man, had got the red of the shingles and the trim a little redder and the blinds a little greener this last spring than ever they had been before.
Overshadowed by great elms, with the yard grass growing thick and lush right up to the bark of the trees, the surroundings of the mill and farmhouse connected with it (at least, all of those surroundings that could be seen from the Cheslow road), were attractive indeed.
Although the old house seemed quite as it always had been from without, many changes had been made inside since first Ruth Fielding had stepped out of Dr. Davison’s chaise to approach her great-uncle’s habitation.
At that time Ruth had been less than a mote in the eye of Uncle Jabez. She was merely an annoyance to the miller at that time. Since then, however, she had many and many a time proved a blessing to him. Nor did Jabez Potter refuse to acknowledge this—on occasion.
When Ruth began to do over the interior of the old house, however, Uncle Jabez protested. The house and mill had been built a hundred and fifty years before—if not longer ago. It was sacrilege to touch a crooked rafter or a hammered nail of the entire structure.
But Ruth insisted that she be allowed to make her own rooms under the roof more comfortable and modern. Ruth had seen old New England farmhouses rebuilt in the most attractive way one could imagine without disturbing their ancient exterior appearance. She gathered ideas from books and magazines, and then went about replanning the entire inside of the mill farmhouse. But she began the actual rejuvenation of the aspect of the structure in her own rooms, and had had all the work done since her return from the war zone the year before.
She now had a bedroom, a sitting room, a dressing room and bathroom up under the roof, all in white (Helen said “like a hospital”), and when one opened Ruth’s outer door and stepped into her suite it seemed as though one entered an entirely different house. And if it was a girl who entered—as Wonota, the Osage princess, did on a certain June day soon after Jennie Stone’s marriage—she could not suppress a cry of delight.
Wonota had stayed before at the Red Mill for a time; but then the workmen had not completed Ruth’s new nest. And although Wonota had been born in a wigwam on the plains and had spent her childhood in a log cabin with a turf roof, she could appreciate “pretty things” quite as keenly as any girl of Ruth’s acquaintance.
That was why Ruth—as well as Mr. Hammond of the Alectrion Film Corporation—believed that the Indian girl would in time become a successful screen actress. Wonota, though her skin was copper-colored, liked to dress in up-to-date clothes (and did so) and enjoyed the refinements of civilization as much as any white girl of her age.
“It is so pretty here, Miss Ruth,” she said to her mentor. “May I sleep in the other bed off your sitting room? It is sweet of you. How foolish of people wanting to see on the screen how poor Indians live in their ignorance. I would rather learn to play the part of a very rich New York lady, and have servants and motor-cars and go to the opera and wear a diamond necklace.”
Ruth laughed at her, but good-naturedly.
“All girls are the same, I suppose, under the skin,” she said. “But we each should try to do the things we can do best. Learn to play the parts the director assigns you to the very best of your ability. Doing that will bring you, quicker than anything else, to the point where you can wear diamonds and ride in your own motor-car and go to the opera. What does your father, Chief Totantora, say to your new ideas, Wonota?”
“The chief, my father, says nothing when I talk like that to him. He is too much of an old-fashioned Indian, I fear. He is staying at a country hotel up the road; but he would not sleep in the room they gave him (and then he rolled up in his blanket on the floor) until they agreed to let him take out the sashes from all three windows. He says that white people have white faces because they sleep in stale air.”
“Perhaps he is more than half right,” rejoined Ruth, although she laughed too. “Some white folks even in this age are afraid of the outdoor air as a sleeping tonic, and prefer to drug themselves with shut-in air in their bedrooms.”
“But one can have pretty things and nice things, and still remain in health,” sighed Wonota.
Ruth agreed with this. The girl of the Red Mill tried, too, in every way to encourage the Indian maiden to learn and profit by the better things to be gained by association with the whites.
There were several days to wait before Mr. Hammond was ready to send Mr. Hooley, the director, and the company selected for the making of Ruth’s new picture to the Thousand Islands. Meanwhile Ruth herself had many preparations to make and she could not be all the time with her visitor.
As in that past time when she had visited the Red Mill, Wonota was usually content to sit with Aunt Alvirah and make beadwork while the old woman knitted.
“She’s a contented creeter, my pretty,” the old woman said to Ruth. “Red or white, I never see such a quiet puss. And she jumps and runs to wait on me like you do.
“Oh, my back! and oh, my bones!” exclaimed Aunt Alvirah, rising cautiously with the aid of a cane she now depended upon. “My rheumatism don’t seem any better, and I have had it long enough, seems to me, for it to get better,” she added.
“Poor dear!” said Ruth. “Don’t the new medicine do any good?”
“Lawsy me, child! I’ve drenched myself with doctor’s stuff till I’m ashamed to look a medicine bottle in the face. My worn out old carcass can’t be helped much by any drugs at all. I guess, as my poor old mother used to say, the only sure cure for rheumatics is graveyard mould.”
“Oh, Aunt Alvirah!”
“I don’t say it complainingly,” declared the little old woman, smiling quite cheerfully. “But I tell Jabez Potter he might as well make up his mind to seeing my corner of his hearth empty one of these days. And he’ll miss me, too, cantankerous as he is sometimes.”
But Uncle Jabez was seldom “cantankerous” nowadays when Ruth was at home. To the miller’s mind his great-niece had proved herself to be of the true Potter blood, although her name was Fielding.
Ruth was a money-maker. He had to wink pretty hard over the fact that she was likewise a money spender! But one girl—and a young one at that—could scarcely be expected (and so the old miller admitted) to combine all the virtues which were worth while in human development.
“Keep a-making of it, Niece Ruth,” Uncle Jabez advised earnestly. “You never can tell when you are going to want more or when your ability to make money is going to stop. I’d sell the Red Mill or give up and never grind another grist for nobody, if I didn’t feel that perhaps by next year I should have to stop, anyway—and another year won’t much matter.”
“You get so little pleasure out of life, Uncle Jabez,” Ruth once said in answer to this statement of the old man.
“Shucks! Don’t you believe it. I don’t know no better fun than watching the corn in the hopper or the stuns go round and round while the meal flour runs out of the spout below, warm and nice-smellin’. The millin’ business is just as pretty a business as there is in the world—when once you git used to the dust. No doubt of it.”
“I can see, Uncle Jabez, that you find it so,” said Ruth, but rather doubtfully.
“Of course it is,” said the old man stoutly. “You get fun out of running about the country and looking at things and seeing how other folks live and work. And that’s all right for you. You make money out of it. But what would I get out of gadding about?”
“A broader outlook on life, Uncle Jabez.”
“I don’t want no broader outlook. I don’t need nothing of the kind. Nor does Alviry Boggs, though she’s got to talking a dreadful lot lately about wanting to ride around in an automobile. At her age, too!”
“You should own a car, Uncle Jabez,” urged Ruth.
“Now, stop that! Stop that, Niece Ruth! I won’t hear to no such foolishness. You show me how I can make money riding up and down the Lumano in a pesky motor-car, and maybe I’ll do like Alviry wants me to, and buy one of the contraptions.” “Hullo, now!” added the miller suddenly. “Who might this be?”
Ruth turned to see one of the very motor-cars that Uncle Jabez so scorned (or pretended to) stopping before the wide door of the mill itself.
But as it was the man driving the roadster, rather than the car itself, Uncle Jabez had spoken of, Ruth gave her attention to him. He was a ruddy, tubby little man in a pin-check black and white suit, faced with silk on lapels and pockets—it really gave him a sort of minstrel-like appearance as though he should likewise have had his face corked—and he wore in a puffed maroon scarf a stone that flashed enough for half a dozen ordinary diamonds—whether it really was of the first water or not.
This man hopped out from back of the wheel of the roadster and came briskly up the graveled rise from the road to the door of the mill. He favored Ruth with a side glance and half smile that the girl of the Red Mill thought (she had seen plenty of such men) revealed his character very clearly. But he spoke to Uncle Jabez.
“I say, Pop, is this the place they call the Red Mill?”
“I calkerlate it is,” agreed the miller dryly. “Leastways, it’s the only Red Mill I ever heard tell on.”
“I reckoned I’d got to the right dump,” said the visitor cheerfully. “I understand there’s an Injun girl stopping here? Is that so?”
Uncle Jabez glanced at Ruth and got her permission to speak before he answered:
“I don’t know as it’s any of your business, Mister; but the Princess Wonota, of the Osage Nation, is stopping here just now. What might be your business with her?”
“So she calls herself a ‘princess’ does she?” returned the man, grinning again at Ruth in an offensive way. “Well, I have managed a South Sea Island chief, a pair of Circassian twins, and a bunch of Eskimos, in my time. I guess I know how to act in the presence of Injun royalty. Trot her out.”
“Trot who out?” asked the miller calmly, but with eyes that flashed under his penthouse brows. “Wonota ain’t no horse. Did you think she was?”
“I know what she is,” returned the man promptly. “It’s what she is going to be that interests me. I’m Bilby—Horatio Bilby. Maybe you’ve heard of me?”
“I have,” said Ruth rather sharply.
At once Mr. Bilby’s round, dented, brown hat came off and he bowed profoundly.
“Happy to make your acquaintance, Miss,” he said.
“You haven’t made it yet—near as I can calkerlate,” gruffly said Uncle Jabez. “And it’s mebbe a question if you get much acquainted with Wonota. What’s your business with her, anyway?”
“I’ll show you, old gent,” said Bilby, taking a number of important looking papers from his pocket. “I have come here to get this princess, as you call her. The Indian Department has sent me. She is a ward of the Government, as you perhaps know. It seems she is held under a false form of contract to a moving picture corporation, and Wonota’s friends have applied to the Bureau of Indian Affairs to look into the matter and get at the rights of the business.”
Ruth uttered a cry of amazement; but Uncle Jabez said calmly enough:
“And what have you got to do with it all, Mister—if I may be so curious as to ask?”
“The girl is given into my charge while her affairs are being looked into,” said Mr. Horatio Bilby, with an explanatory flourish which included both the miller and Ruth in its sweeping gesture.