CHAPTER XXIV--THE REAL THING

Freezeout Camp had awakened. Many of the old shacks and cabins had been repaired and made habitable for the purposes of the moving picture company. The largest dance hall--"The Palace of Pleasure" as it was called on the film--was just as Flapjack Peters remembered it, back in an earlier rush for placer gold to this spot.

Behind the rough bar, on the shelves, however, were only empty bottles, or, at most, those filled with colored water. Mr. Hammond had been careful to keep liquor out of the rejuvenated camp.

Flapjack Peters began to look like a different man. Whether it was his enforced abstinence from drink, or the fact that he saw ahead the possibility of wealth and the tall hat and white vest of which he had dreamed, he walked erect and looked every man straight in the eye.

"It gets me!" said Min to Ruth Fielding. "Pop ain't looked like this since I kin remember."

Two days of this excitement passed. The motion picture people "were getting down to earth again," as Mr. Grimes said, and the girls were beginning to expect Tom Cameron's return, when one noon the head of a procession was seen advancing through the nearest pass in the mountain range to the west. As Ruth and others watched, the procession began to wind down into the shallow gorge where the long "petered-out" placer diggings of Freezeout had been located, and where the rejuvenated town itself still stood.

"What under the sun can these people want?" gasped Mr. Hammond, the president of the film-making company, to Ruth.

The girl of the Red Mill was in riding habit and she had her pony near at hand. "I'll ride up and see," she said.

But the instant she had sighted the first group of hurrying riders and the first wagon, she believed she understood. Word of the "strike" at the old camp had in some way become noised abroad.

Before Edith Phelps and the men she was to hire, with the Kingman lawyer's aid, reached the ledge her brother had located, other people had heard the news. These were the first of "the gold rush."

She spurred her horse up into the pass and ran the pony half a mile before she turned him and raced back to Mr. Hammond. She came with flying hair and rosy cheeks to the worried president, bursting with an idea that had assailed her mind.

"Mr. Hammond! It is the greatest sight you ever saw! Get the camera man and hurry right up there to the mouth of the pass. Tell Mr. Grimes----"

"What do you mean?" snapped the president of the Alectrion Film Corporation. "Do you want to disorganize my whole company again?"

"I want to show you the greatest moving picture that ever was taken!" cried the girl of the Red Mill. "Oh, Mr. Hammond, you _must_ take it! It must be incorporated in this film. Why! _it is the real thing!_"

"What is that? A joke?" he growled.

"No joke at all, I assure you," said Ruth, patiently. "You can see them coming through the pass--and beyond--for miles and miles. Men afoot, on horseback, in all kinds of wagons, on burros--oh, it is simply great! There are hundreds and hundreds of them. Why, Mr. Hammond! this Freezeout Camp is going to be a city before night!"

The chief reason why Mr. Hammond was a wealthy man and one of the powers in the motion picture world was because he could seize upon a new idea and appreciate its value in a moment. He knew that Ruth was a sane girl and that she had judgment, as well as imagination. He gaped at her for a moment, perhaps; the next he was shouting for Mr. Grimes, for the camera men, for the horse wrangler, and for the "call-boy" to round up the company.

In half an hour a train set out for the pass, which met the first of the advance guard of gold seekers pouring down into the valley. The eager-faced men of all ages and apparently of all walks in life hurried on almost silently toward the spot where they were told a ledge of free gold had been found.

There were roughly dressed teamsters, herdsmen, nondescripts; there were Mexicans and Indians; there were well dressed city men--lawyers, doctors, other professional men, perhaps. Afterward Ruth read in an Arizona newspaper that such a typical stampede to any new-found gold or silver strike had not been seen in a decade.

A camera man set up his machine in a good spot and waited for the whole film company to drift along into the pass and join the real gold seekers that streamed down toward Freezeout.

This idea of Ruth Fielding's was the crowning achievement of her work on this film. The company came back to the cabins at evening, wearied and dust-choked, to find, as Ruth had prophesied, a veritable city on and near the creek.

The newcomers had rushed into the hills and staked out their claims, some of them on the very fringe of the valley out of which the gold-bearing ledge rose. Of course, many of these claims would be worthless.

A lively buying and selling of the more worthless claims was already under way. With the stampede had come storekeepers and wagons of foodstuffs.

That night nobody slept. Mr. Hammond, realizing what this really meant, but feeling none of the itch for digging gold that most of those on the spot experienced, organized a local constabulary. A justice of the peace was found with intelligence enough, and enough knowledge of the state ordinance, to act as magistrate.

The men were called together early in the morning in the biggest dance hall and the vast majority--indeed, it was almost unanimous--voted that liquor selling be tabooed at Freezeout.

Several men of unsavory reputations who had come, like buzzards scenting the carrion from afar, were advised to leave town and stay away. They met other men of their stripe on the trail from Handy Gulch and other such places, and reported that Freezeout was going to be run "on a Sunday-school basis"; there was nothing in it for the usual birds of prey that infest such camps.

In a few hours the party coming from Kingman with Edith Phelps and the lawyer she had engaged, arrived. The camp about the ridge grew and expanded in every direction. Most of the claimholders slept on their claims, fearing trickery. Shafts were sunk. The Phelps crowd began to set up a small crusher and cyaniding plant that had been trucked over the trails.

The moving picture was finished at last, before either Mr. Grimes or Mr. Hammond quite lost their minds. Several of the men of the company broke their contract with the Alectrion Film Corporation and would remain at the diggings. They believed their claims were valuable.

Tom had returned before this with reports from the assayer and copies of the filing of the claims. The specimen from Ruth's claim showed one hundred and eighty dollars to the ton. The ore from Flapjack Peters and Min's claims were, after all, the richest of any of their party, though farther down the ledge. The ore taken from those claims showed two hundred dollars to the ton.

"We're rich--or we're goin' to be," Min declared to the Ardmore girls and Miss Cullam, the last night the Eastern visitors were to remain in Freezeout. "That lawyer of R'yal Phelps is goin' to let pop have some money and we're both goin' to send for clo'es--some duds! Wish you could wait and see me togged up just like a Fourth o' July pony in the parade."

"I wish we could, Min!" cried Jennie Stone.

"You shall come East to visit me later," Ruth declared. "Won't you, Min? We'll all show you a good time there."

"As though you hadn't showed me the best time I ever had already," choked the Yucca girl. "But I'll come--after I git used to my new clo'es."

"Have you and your father really made a bargain with Royal Phelps?" Miss Cullam asked, as much interested in the welfare of the suddenly enriched girl as her pupils.

"Yes, Ma'am. Pop's going to have an office in the new company, too. And Mr. Phelps is goin' to git backin' from the East and buy up all the adjoinin' claims that he can."

"He'll have all ours, in time," said Helen. "That's lots better than each of us trying to develop her little claim. Oh, that Phelps man is smart."

"And what about Edith?" demanded the honest Ruth. "We've got to praise her, too."

There was silence. Finally, Miss Cullam said dryly: "She seems to have no very enthusiastic friends in the audience, Miss Fielding."

"Oh, well," Ruth said, laughing, "we none of us like Edith."

"How about liking her brother?" asked Jennie Stone, and she seemed to say it pointedly.