Ruth Fielding on the St. Lawrence; Or, The Queer Old Man of the Thousand Islands

by Alice B. Emerson

With one movement, it seemed, Copley had risen and kicked his own chair away, seized Ruth about her waist as he did so, and so dragged her out from under the avalanche.

It was all over in a moment, and the two stood, clinging to each other involuntarily, while the dust of the fallen plaster spread around them.

For a moment Ruth Fielding had been in as perilous a situation as she had ever experienced, and her life had been rather full of peril and adventure since, as a girl of twelve, and in the first volume of this series, we met her as “Ruth Fielding of the Red Mill.”

At the time just mentioned, the orphaned Ruth had appeared at her great-uncle’s mill on the Lumano River, near Cheslow, in one of the New England States, and had been taken in by the miserly old miller rather under protest. But Aunt Alvirah Boggs, who was Uncle Jabez Potter’s housekeeper, had loved the child from the very beginning. And in truth the old miller loved Ruth too, only he was slow to admit it.

Ruth’s first young friends at the Red Mill were the Cameron twins, and with Helen she had spent her schools days and many of her vacations, at Briarwood Hall, in the North Woods, at the seashore, in the West, in the South, Down East, and in other localities, the narrated adventures of which are to be found in the several volumes of the Ruth Fielding Series.

In the book just preceding this present story, “Ruth Fielding in the Great Northwest,” Helen was likewise with Ruth when she made her famous moving picture, “Brighteyes” in connection with the Alectrion Film Corporation, the president of which, Mr. Hammond, had first encouraged Ruth to turn her entire time and talent to the writing of moving picture scenarios.

The fall before the time of this wedding party in which the girl of the Red Mill was taking part, fortune threw in Ruth’s way a charming young woman, a full-blood Osage Indian, in whom Mr. Hammond saw possibilities of development for screen acting. At least, to use the trite and bombastic moving picture phrase, Wonota, the Indian princess, “photographed like a million dollars.”

The Great War’s abrupt conclusion brought Tom Cameron home just as eager as he had been for two years past to have Ruth agree to his plans for the future. As Ruth saw it (no matter what may have been her secret feeling for Tom) to do as Tom wished would utterly spoil the career on which she had now entered so successfully.

Tom, like most young men in love, considered that a girl’s only career should be a husband and a home. He frankly said that he was prepared, young as he was, to supply both for Ruth.

But their youth, in the first place, was an objection in the very sensible mind of Ruth. It was true, too, that a second objection was the fact that she wanted to live her own life and establish herself in the great career she had got into almost by chance.