CHAPTER XIII--AN URSINE HOLDUP

Peters was still struggling with his captors and talking wildly. He evidently did not know his own daughter.

"Well, what you goin' to do with him?" demanded Bob, the pipeman. "We ain't expected to stand and hold him all day, if we ain't goin' to be 'lowed to hang him--the ornery critter!"

"You shet up, Bob Davis!" said Min. "You ain't no pulin' infant yourself when you're drunk, and you know it."

The other men began laughing at the angry miner, and Bob admitted:

"Well, s'posin' that's so? I'm sober now. And I got work to do. So's these other fellows. What you want done with Flapjack?"

Ruth Fielding was so deeply interested for Min's sake that she could not help interfering.

"Oh, Min, isn't there a doctor in this camp?"

"Yes'm. Doc Quibbly. He's here, ain't he, boys?"

"The old doc's down to his office in the tin shack beyant the hotel," said one. "I seen him not an hour ago."

"Let's take your father to the hotel, Min," Ruth said. "These men will help us, I know. So will Tom Cameron. We will have the doctor look after your father."

"The old doc can dope him a-plenty, I reckon," said Bob.

"Sure we'll help you," said the rough fellows, who were not really hard-hearted after all.

"I dunno's they'll let him into the hotel," Min said.

"Yes they will. We'll pay for his room and you and the doctor can look out for him," Ruth declared.

"You are good and helpful, Ruth Fielding," said Miss Cullam, coming forward, much as she despised the condition of the man, Peters. "How terrible! But one must be sorry for that poor girl."

"And Min has pluck all right!" cried Jennie Stone, admiringly. "We must help her."

They were all agreed in this. Even Rebecca and Miss Cullam, who both shrank from the coarseness of the men and the roughness of Min and her father, commiserated the man's misfortune and were sorry for Min's strait.

Tom assisted in leading the wildly-talking Peters to the hotel. Ruth and Miss Cullam hurried on in advance to engage a room for the man whom they assured the proprietor was really ill. Min, meanwhile, went in search of the camp's medical practitioner.

Dr. Quibbly was a gray-bearded man with keen eyes but palsied hands. He had plainly been wrecked by misfortune or some disease; but he had been left with all his mental powers unimpaired.

He took hold of the distraught Peters in a capable manner; and Tom, who remained to help nurse the patient, declared to Ruth and Helen that he never hoped to see a doctor who knew his business better than Dr. Quibbly knew it.

"He had Peters quiet in half an hour. No harmful drug, either. Told me everything he used. Says rest, and milk and eggs to build up the stomach, is all the chap needs. Min's with him now and I'm going to sleep in my blanket outside the door to-night, so if she needs anybody I'll be within call."

It had been rather an exciting experience for the girls and they remained in their rooms for the rest of the day. The hotel proprietor offered to take them around at night and "show them the sights"; but as that meant visiting the two saloons and gambling halls, Miss Cullam refused for the party, rather tartly.

"No offence meant, Ma'am," said the hotel man, Mr. Bennett. "But most of the tenderfeet that come here hanker to 'go slumming,' as they call it. They want to see these here miners at their amusements, as well as at their daily occupations."

"I'd rather see them at church," Miss Cullam told him frankly. "I think they need it."

"Good glory, Ma'am!" exclaimed the man. "We git that, too--once a month. What more kin you expect?"

"I suppose," Miss Cullam said to her girls, "that a perfectly straight-laced New England old maid could not be set down in a more inappropriate place than a mining camp."

The speech gave Ruth a suggestion for a scene in the picture play of "The Forty-Niners," and she would have been delighted to have the Ardmore teacher play a part in that scene.

"However," she said to Helen, whispering it over in bed that night, "it will be funny. I know Mr. Hammond will bring plenty of costumes of the period of forty-nine, for he wants women in the show. And there will be some character actress who can take the part of an unsophisticated blue stocking from the Hub, who arrives at the camp in the midst of the miner's revelry."

"Oh, my!" gasped Helen. "Miss Cullam will think you are making fun of her."

"No she won't----the dear thing! She has too much good sense. But she _has_ given me what Tom would call a dandy idea."

"Isn't it nice to have Tom--or somebody--to lay our use of slang to?" said Ruth's chum demurely.

The party did not leave Handy Gulch the next day, nor the day following. There were several excuses given for this delay and they were all good.

One of the ponies had developed lameness; and a burro wandered away and Pedro had to spend half a day searching for him. Perhaps the Mexican lad would have been quicker about this had Min been on hand to hurry him. But having been close beside her father all night she lay down for needed sleep while Tom Cameron and the doctor took her place.

The report from the sickroom was favorable. In a few hours the man who had come so near to bringing about a tragedy in Handy Gulch would be fit to travel. Ruth declared that she would wait for him, and he should go along with the party to Freezeout.

"But you are our guide and general factotum, Min. We depend on you," she told the sick man's daughter.

"I dunno what that thing is you called me; but I guess it ain't a bad name," said Min Peters. "If you'll jest let pop trail along so's I kin watch him he'll be as good as pie, I know."

Then, there was Miss Cullam's reason for not wishing to start. She said she was "saddle sick."

"I have been seasick, and trainsick; but I think saddlesick must be the worst, for it lasts longer. I can lie in bed now," said the poor woman, "and feel myself wabbling just as I do in that hateful saddle.

"Oh, dear, me, Ruthie Fielding! I wish I had never agreed to come without demanding a comfortable carriage."

"They tell me that there are places on the trail before we get to Freezeout so narrow that a carriage can't be used. The wagons are going miles and miles around so as to escape the rough places of the straighter trail."

"Goodness!" exclaimed Miss Cullam in disgust. "Is it necessary to get to Freezeout Camp in such a short time? I tell you right now: I am going to rest in bed for two days."

And she did. The girls were not worried, however. They found plenty to see and to do about the mining town. As for Ruth, she set to work on her scenario, and kept Rebecca Frayne busy with the typewriter, too. She sketched out the scene she had mentioned to Helen, and it was so funny that Rebecca giggled all the time she was typewriting it.

"Goodness!" murmured Ruth. "I hope the audiences will think it is as funny as you do. The only trouble is, unless a good deal of the conversation is thrown on the screen, they will miss some of the best points. Dear me! Such is fate. I was born to be a humorist--a real humorist--in a day and age when 'custard-pie comedians' have the right-of-way."

The third day the party started bright and early on the Freezeout trail. Flapjack Peters was well enough to ride; and he was woefully sorry for what he had done. But he was still too much "twisted" in his mind to be able to tell Ruth just how he came to start away from Yucca with Edith Phelps and Ann Hicks, instead of waiting for the entire party to arrive.

Ann had told all she knew about it at her meeting with Ruth. It remained a mystery why Edith had come to Yucca; why she had kept Ann and her friends apart; and why at Handy Gulch she had abandoned both Ann and Flapjack Peters.

"She met a man here, that's all I know," said Ann, with disgust.

"Maybe it was the man who wrote her from Yucca," said Helen to Ruth.

"'Box twenty-four, R. F. D., Yucca, Arizona,'" murmured Ruth. "We should have made inquiries in Yucca about the person who has his mail come to that postbox."

"These hindsights that should have been foresights are the limit!" groaned Helen. "We must admit that Edie Phelps has put one over on us. But what it is she has done _I_ do not comprehend."

"That is what bothers me," Ruth said, shaking her head.

They set off on this day from the Gulch in a spirit of cheerfulness, and ready for any adventure. However, none of the party--not a soul of it--really expected what did happen before the end of the day.

As usual the pony cavalcade got ahead of the burros in the forenoon. The little animals would go only so fast no matter what was done to them.

"You could put a stick of dynamite under one o' them critters," Min said, "and he'd rise slow-like. 'Hurry up' ain't knowed to the burros' language--believe me!"

The pony cavalcade was halted most surprisingly about noon, and in a way which bid fair to delay the party until the burros caught up, if not longer. They had got well into the hills. The cliffs rose on either hand to towering heights. Thick and scrubby woods masked the sides of the gorge through which they rode.

"It is as wild as one could imagine," said Miss Cullam, riding with Tom in the lead. "What do you suppose is the matter with my pony, Mr. Cameron?"

Tom had begun to be puzzled about his own mount--a wise old, flea-bitten gray. The ponies had pricked their ears forward and were snuffing the air as though there was some unpleasant odor assailing their nostrils.

"I don't know just what is the matter," Tom confessed. "But these creatures can see and smell a lot that _we_ can't, Miss Cullam. Perhaps we had better halt and----"

He got no further. They were just rounding an elbow in the trail. There before them, rising up on their haunches in the path, were three gray and black bears!

"Ow-yow!" shrieked Jennie Stone. "Do you girls see the same things _I_ do?"

To those ahead, however, it seemed no matter for laughter. The bears--evidently a female with two cubs--were too close for fun-making.