"Not a bit of it, dear child. Listen, Ruth Spooner, there's just seventy-nine dollars in your green box. Twenty-six added makes a hundred and five. Five dollars is a great plenty for expenses, seeing that we have the pumpkins already. The odd fifty cents will buy a little present for the Babe, and leave you your full hundred to pay Maudie Pratt for her ring. 'Rah, 'rah, 'rah for the girls of the Silver Spur! Our debt's paid!"
"Glory!" Ruth's shouts suddenly wavered, the apron she waved aloft was thrown over her face as she burst into tears.
"O, Elizabeth--shut the door--I don't want anybody else to see me cry. I'm a wretch--and you're a genius--but--but--I can't help thinking about us all working so hard and Maudie Pratt getting all our money!"
"I know, honey," said Elizabeth, understandingly, "if I stop to think I feel that way myself. Let's not stop to think."
Ruth choked down her tears, bathed her eyes and turned a resolute face from the washstand.
"I'm all right," she said in a determinedly cheerful voice.
Elizabeth threw open the bedroom door and ran out among their helpers.
"Kindle a fire, Babe, while we get the pumpkins. Isn't it a mercy that Roy and Jonah are off the range to-day and can stay. Everybody'll have to get to work cutting up pumpkins--even mother."
All day they baked. The stove in the house, the brick oven in the yard which had scarcely been allowed to get cold since Ruth began her enterprise, were both kept filled. The baked pies were lifted out of their tins as soon as cool enough and dropped into paper plates. But even so they could not get enough tins to keep the baking up to the volume required for getting out the hundred pies in that length of time. At last Ruth announced in tones of dismay:
"There isn't a single tin left. What shall we do?"