CHAPTER XXIV—THE REAL THING
Freezeout Camp had awakened. Many of the old shacks and cabins had been repaired and made habitable for the purposes of the moving picture company. The largest dance hall—“The Palace of Pleasure” as it was called on the film—was just as Flapjack Peters remembered it, back in an earlier rush for placer gold to this spot.
Behind the rough bar, on the shelves, however, were only empty bottles, or, at most, those filled with colored water. Mr. Hammond had been careful to keep liquor out of the rejuvenated camp.
Flapjack Peters began to look like a different man. Whether it was his enforced abstinence from drink, or the fact that he saw ahead the possibility of wealth and the tall hat and white vest of which he had dreamed, he walked erect and looked every man straight in the eye.
“It gets me!” said Min to Ruth Fielding. “Pop ain’t looked like this since I kin remember.”
Two days of this excitement passed. The motion picture people “were getting down to earth again,” as Mr. Grimes said, and the girls were beginning to expect Tom Cameron’s return, when one noon the head of a procession was seen advancing through the nearest pass in the mountain range to the west. As Ruth and others watched, the procession began to wind down into the shallow gorge where the long “petered-out” placer diggings of Freezeout had been located, and where the rejuvenated town itself still stood.
“What under the sun can these people want?” gasped Mr. Hammond, the president of the film-making company, to Ruth.
The girl of the Red Mill was in riding habit and she had her pony near at hand. “I’ll ride up and see,” she said.
But the instant she had sighted the first group of hurrying riders and the first wagon, she believed she understood. Word of the “strike” at the old camp had in some way become noised abroad.
Before Edith Phelps and the men she was to hire, with the Kingman lawyer’s aid, reached the ledge her brother had located, other people had heard the news. These were the first of “the gold rush.”