“How are we going to have any fun, Ruth Fielding, if you keep out of it?” demanded Ann Hicks.
“I shall get up early and work in the forenoon. While the mood is on me and my mind is fresh, you know,” laughed Ruth. “That is, I shall do that after I really get to work. First I must ‘soak in’ local color.”
She did this by wandering alone through the shallow gorge, from the first, or lower “diggings,” up to the final abandoned claim, where the gold pockets had petered out. There were hundreds of places about the old camp where the gold hunters had dug in hope of finding the precious metal.
Ruth really knew little about this work. But she had learned from hearing Min and her father talk that, wherever there was gold in “pockets” and “streaks” in the sand there must somewhere near be “a mother lode.” Flapjack confessed to having spent weeks looking for that mother lode about Freezeout Camp. It had never been discovered.
“And after the Chinks got through with this here place, you couldn’t find a pinch of placer gold big enough t’ fill your pipe,” the old prospector announced. “I reckon she’s here somewhere; but there won’t nobody find her now.”
Ruth saw some things that made her wonder if somebody had not been looking for gold here much more recently than Flapjack Peters supposed. In three separate places beside the brawling stream that ran down the gorge, it seemed to her the heaped up sand was still wet. She knew about “cradling”—that crude manner of separating gold from the soil; and it seemed to her as though somebody had recently tried for “color” along the edge of this stream.
However, Ruth Fielding’s mind was fixed upon something far different from placer mining. She was brooding over a motion picture, and she was determined to turn out a better scenario than she had ever before written.
Hazel Gray, whom Ruth and her chum, Helen, had met a year and a half before, and who had played the heroine’s part in “The Heart of a Schoolgirl,” was to come on with Mr. Hammond and his company to play the chief woman’s part in the new drama. For there was to be a strong love interest in the story, and that thread of the plot was already quite clear in Ruth’s mind.
She had recently, however, considered Min Peters as a foil for Hazel Gray. Min was exactly the type of girl to fit into the story of “The Forty-Niners. As for her ability to act——
“There is no girl who can’t act, if she gets the chance, I am sure,” thought Ruth. “Only, some can act better than others.”