CHAPTER XV--MORE DISCOVERIES

A quick but thorough search of the abandoned mining camp revealed no living person save the party of tourists themselves.

Ruth's inquiry for the persons who had built the campfire aroused the curiosity of Min Peters and her father, and they made some investigations for which the girl from the East scarcely saw the reason.

"If we've got neighbors here, might's well know who they are," said Flapjack, who was gradually finding his voice and was "spunking up," according to his daughter's statement.

Peters was particularly anxious to please. He felt deeply the humiliation of what he had gone through at Handy Gulch, and wished to show Ruth and the other girls that he was of some account.

No Indian could have scrutinized the vicinity of the dead campfire which Ruth had found more carefully than he did. Finally he announced that two men had been here at the abandoned settlement the night before.

"One big feller and a mighty little man. I don't know what to make of that little feller's footprints," said the old prospector. "Mebbe he ain't only a boy. But they camped here--sure. And they've gone on--right out through the dry watercourse an' toward the east. I reckon they was harmless."

"They surely will be harmless if they keep on going and never come back," laughed Ruth. "But I hope there are not many idlers hanging about this neighbourhood. I suppose there are some bad characters in these hills?"

"About as bad as tramps are in town," said Min, scornfully. "You folks from the East do have funny ideas. Ev'ry other man out here ain't a train robber nor a cattle rustler. No, ma'am!"

"The movie company will supply all those, I fancy," chuckled Jennie Stone. "Going to have a real, bad road agent in your play, Ruthie?"

"Never mind what I am going to have," retorted Ruth, shaking her head. "I mean to have just as true a picture as possible of the old-time gold diggings; and that doesn't mean that guns are flourished every minute or two. Mr. Peters can help me a lot by telling me what he remembers of this very camp, I know."

Flapjack was greatly pleased at this. Although Ruth continued to keep Min, the girl guide, to the fore, she saw that the girl's father was going to be vastly pleased by being made of some account.

It was he who advised which of the cabins should be made habitable for the party. One was selected for the girls and Miss Cullam to sleep in; another for the men; and a third for a kitchen.

But Flapjack made supper that night in the open as usual. For the first time he proudly displayed to the girls from the East the talent by which his nickname originated.

Min made a great "crock" of batter and greased the griddles for him. Flapjack stood, red faced and eager, over the bed of live coals and handled the two griddles in an expert manner.

The cakes were as large as breakfast plates, and were browned to a beautiful shade--one fried in each griddle. When the time came to turn them, Flapjack Peters performed this delicate operation by tossing them into the air, and with such a sleight of hand that the flapjacks exchanged griddles in their "turnover".

"Dear me!" murmured Miss Cullam. "Such acrobatic cooking I never beheld. But the cakes are remarkably tasty."

"Aeroplane pancakes," suggested Tom Cameron. "Believe me, they are as light as they fly, too."

That night the party was particularly jolly. They had reached their destination and, as Miss Cullam said in relief, without dire mishap.

The girls were, after all, glad to shut a door against the whole outside world when they went to bed; although the windows were merely holes in the cabin walls through which the air had a perfectly free circulation.

There were six bunks in the cabin; but only one of them was put in proper condition for use. Miss Cullam was given that and the girls rolled up in their blankets on the floor, with their saddles, as usual, for pillows.

"We have got so used to camping out of doors," Helen Cameron said, "that we shall be unable to sleep in our beds when we get home."

In the morning, however, the first work Min started was to fill bags with dried grass from the hillsides and make mattresses for all the bunks. Tom had brought along hammer and nails as well as a saw, and with the old prospector's assistance he repaired the remainder of the bunks in the girls' cabin and put up three new ones. There was plenty of building material about the camp.

Ruth, meantime, cleared out a fourth cabin. Here was set up the typewriter, and she and Rebecca Frayne planned to make the hut their workshop.

"You girls, as long as you don't leave the confines of the camp alone, are welcome to go where you please, only, save, and excepting to the sanctum sanctorum," Ruth said at lunch time. "I am going to put up a sign over the door, 'Beware.'"

"But surely, Ruth, you're not going to work _all_ the time?" complained Helen.

"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."

Ruth really had little doubt about Min's ability to play the part that she had thought out for her. Only, would she do it? Would she feel that her own character and condition in life was being held up to ridicule? Ruth had to be careful about that.

On returning to the camp she said nothing about the discoveries she had made along the bank of the stream. But that evening, after supper, as the whole party were grouped before the cabins they had now made fairly comfortable, Trix Davenport suddenly startled them all by crying:

"See there! Who's that?"

"Who's where, Trixie?" asked Jennie, lazily. "Are you seeing things?"

"I certainly am," said the diminutive girl.

"So do I!" Sally exclaimed. "There's a man on horseback."

In the purple dusk they saw him mounting a distant ridge east of the stream--almost on the confines of the valley on that side. It was only for a minute that he held in his horse and seemed to be gazing down at the fire flickering in the principal street of Freezeout Camp.

Then he rode on, out of sight.