They rode back to Knockout Point to find the entire company in a state of excitement and alarm.
Carried to her room by Tom, who still would not let her put her foot to the ground, Ruth sent at once for her assistant directors and the cameramen.
“What you need is to rest for a little, Ruthie,” protested Helen. To the latter and Chess, Tom had explained briefly how he had found Ruth and released her from the steel jaws of the trap. “Your poor foot must pain you terribly.”
“It’s nothing!” cried Ruth, impatient of anything that might delay her search for the missing films. “By to-morrow the ankle will be well again. But the magazines! Tom, why don’t those people hurry?”
They came before she had finished speaking the words—a solemn-visaged group of men, fully realizing the gravity of the situation.
“Sit down, please,” she said curtly. “Now please tell me whose fault it is that this thing happened to-day. I suppose you know,” she added, her steady gaze holding them, “just what it means!”
“We know only too well, Miss Fielding,” said Bert Traymore, with a worried frown. “We had the take-up boxes locked in the big chest. There was a padlock besides——”
“And that was forced as well as the lock,” said Schultz.
“What was taken?” Ruth’s anxiety made the words sting like the lash of a whip.
“Magazines seven and ten,” said Atwater, and added in a gloomy voice, as though he thought the worst might as well be told at once: “Miss Lang’s big scene was in number ten.”