He was already out of the car and madly turning the crank. In a moment the engine was throbbing. Tom leaped back behind the wheel and the automobile darted ahead.
The rough road led directly along the verge of the river bank. The picture-play actors scattered as he bore down upon them. It gave Tom, as well as the girls, considerable satisfaction to see the director, Grimes, jump out of the way of the rapidly moving car.
The friends in the car saw the actress, whom Grimes had called both "Hazel" and "Miss Gray," swirled far out from the shore; but they knew the current or an eddy would bring her back. She sank once; but she came up again and fought the current like the plucky girl she was.
"Oh, Helen! she's wonderful!" gasped Ruth, with clasped hands, as she watched this fight for life which was more thrilling than anything she had ever seen reproduced on the screen.
Helen was too frightened to reply; but Ruth Fielding often before had shown remarkable courage and self-possession in times of emergency. No more than the excited Tom did she lose her head on this occasion.
As has been previously told, Ruth had come to the banks of the Lumano River and to her Uncle Jabez Potter's Red Mill some years before, when she was a small girl. She was an orphan, and the crabbed and miserly miller was her single living relative.
The first volume of the series, entitled "Ruth Fielding of the Red Mill," tells of the incidents which follow Ruth's coming to reside with her uncle, and with Aunt Alvirah Boggs, who was "everybody's aunt" but nobody's relative.
The first and closest friends of her own age that Ruth made in her new home were Helen and Tom Cameron, twin children of a wealthy merchant whose all-year home was not far from the Red Mill. With Helen and Mercy Curtis, a lame girl, Ruth is sent to Briarwood Hall, a delightfully situated boarding school at some distance from the girls' homes, and there, in the second volume of the series, Ruth is introduced to new scenes, some new friends and a few enemies; but altogether has a delightful time.
Ensuing volumes tell of Ruth and her chums' adventures at Snow Camp; at Lighthouse Point; on Silver Ranch, in Montana; on Cliff Island, where occur a number of remarkable winter incidents; at Sunset Farm during the previous summer; and finally, in the eighth volume, the one immediately preceding this present story, Ruth achieves something that she has long, long desired.
This last volume, called "Ruth Fielding and the Gypsies; Or, The Missing Pearl Necklace," tells of an automobile trip which Ruth and her present companions, Helen and Tom Cameron, took through the hills some distance beyond the Red Mill and Cheslow, their home town.