The boy actor, Eben Howe, came to Ruth in a state of great excitement.
“Say, Miss Fielding, I bet I know who run off with that grease paint,” he said, his eyes fairly starting out of his freckled face. “I saw Joe Rumph sneakin’ around the place just yesterday. I’d know that crooked back anywhere. But when I called out to him, just friendly like, he give me a dirty look and beat it. I bet it was him,” came with all the gravity of the youthful detective, “was after that yellow paint!”
“Probably he thought it would improve his beauty, Eben,” Tom laughed.
But when the boy had gone, Tom and Ruth exchanged glances.
“So Rumph is in this, too,” she said slowly. “They’re pressing us pretty hard, Tom!”
“Now don’t worry,” Tom tried to reassure her. “If they don’t do anything worse, we’ll be lucky.”
“Yes!” said Ruth. “If they don’t!” and Tom did not miss the emphasis on the “if.”
But despite the worries and setbacks, they came to a time when all the big exterior scenes had been shot. At a few of the locations Mary and Ellen Chase had been present, though it was not often that they could leave their work at the mine nor dared to relax their guard of the cabin, even when they left one of the three miners in charge.
In those days Ruth came upon unexpected proof that she had not been wrong in her conviction that Layton Boardman really admired the elder of the Chase girls.
The actor talked to her whenever he had a chance, and once Ruth came upon them at an unsuspected rendezvous in the woods. Mary was talking earnestly and Boardman was listening with the greatest attention, watching the girl all the time with that strange new look in his eyes.