CHAPTER XXV—UNCLE JABEZ IS CONVERTED
It was some months afterward. The growing town of Cheslow had long since developed the moving picture fever, and two very nice theatres had been built.
One evening in the largest of these theatres an old, gray-faced and grim-looking man sat beside a very happy, pretty girl and watched the running off of the seven-reel feature, “The Forty-Niners.”
If the old man came in under duress and watched the first flashes on the screen with scorn, he soon forgot all his objections and sat forward in his seat to watch without blinking the scenes thrown, one after another, on the sheet.
It really was a wonderfully fine picture. And thrilling!
“Hi mighty!” ejaculated Uncle Jabez Potter, unwillingly enough and under his breath in the middle of the picture, “d’ye mean to say you done all that, Niece Ruth?”
“I helped,” said Ruth, modestly.
“Why, it’s as natcheral as the stepstun, I swan!” gasped the miller. “I can ‘member hearin’ many of the men that went out there in the airly days tell about what it was like. This is jest like they said it was. I don’t see how ye did it—an’ you was never born even, when them things was like that.”
“Don’t say that, Uncle Jabez,” Ruth declared. “For I saw a little bit of the real thing. They write me that Freezeout Camp has taken on a new lease of life. Mr. Phelps says,” and she blushed a little, but it was dark and nobody saw it, “that we are all going to make a lot of money out of the Freezeout Ledge.”
But Uncle Jabez Potter was not listening. He was enthralled again in the picture of old days in the mining country. It seemed as though, at last, the old miller was converted to the belief that his grand-niece knew a deal more than he had given her credit for. To his mind, that she knew how to make money was the more important thing.