"Then don"t tell it, Tommy," she added, with a laugh.
But it was hard to meet the sharp eye of Mercy Curtis and keep the secret. "And pray, Miss, why did you have to go into the water after the fish?" Mercy demanded.
"I was afraid he would get away," laughed Ruth.
"And who helped you do it?" snapped the lame girl.
"Helped me do what?"
"Helped you tumble in."
"Now, do you suppose I needed help to do so silly a thing as that?"
cried Ruth.
"You needed help to do it the other day on the steamboat," returned Mercy, slily. "And I saw The Fox following you around that way."
"Why, what nonsense you talk, Mercy Curtis!"
But Ruth wondered if Mercy was to be so easily put off. The lame girl was so very sharp.
However, Ruth was determined to keep her secret. Not a word had she said to Mary c.o.x. Indeed, she had not looked at her since she climbed out of the open pool behind the boulder and, well-nigh breathless, reached the rock after that perilous plunge. Tom she had sworn to silence, Nita she had warned to be still, and now Mercy"s suspicions were to be routed.
"Poor, poor girl!" muttered Ruth, with more sorrow than anger. "If she is not sorry and afraid yet, how will she feel when she awakes in the night and remembers what might have been?"
Nevertheless, the girl from the Red Mill did not allow her secret to disturb her cheerfulness. She hid any feeling she might have had against The Fox. When they all met at dinner on the _Miraflame_, she merely laughed and joked about her accident, and pa.s.sed around dainty bits of the baked tautog that Phineas had prepared especially for her.
That fisherman"s chowder was a marvel, and altogether he proved to be as good a cook as Heavy had declared. The boys had caught several ba.s.s, and they caught more after dinner. But those were saved to take home. The girls, however, had had enough fishing. Ruth"s experience frightened them away from the slippery rocks.
Mary c.o.x was certainly a very strange sort of a girl; but her present att.i.tude did not surprise Ruth. Mary had, soon after Ruth entered Briarwood Hall, taken a dislike to the younger girl. Ruth"s new club--the Sweetbriars--had drawn almost all the new girls in the school, as well as many of Mary"s particular friends; while the Up and Doing Club, of which Mary was the leading spirit, was not alone frowned upon by Mrs. Tellingham and her a.s.sistants, but lost members until--as Helen Cameron had said--the last meeting of the Upedes consisted of The Fox and Helen herself.
The former laid all this at Ruth Fielding"s door. She saw Ruth"s influence and her club increase, while her own friends fell away from her. Twice Ruth had helped to save Mary from drowning, and on neither occasion did the older girl seem in the least grateful. Now Ruth was saving her from the scorn of the other girls and--perhaps--a request from Heavy"s Aunt Kate that Mary pack her bag and return home.
Ruth hoped that Mary would find some opportunity of speaking to her alone before the day was over. But, even when the boys returned from the outer rocks with a splendid string of ba.s.s, and the bow of the _Miraflame_ was turned homeward, The Fox said never a word to her. Ruth crept away into the bows by herself, her mind much troubled. She feared that the fortnight at Lighthouse Point might become very unpleasant, if Mary continued to be so very disagreeable.
Suddenly somebody tapped her on the arm. The motor boat was pushing toward the mouth of Sokennet Harbor and the sun was well down toward the horizon. The girls were in the cabin, singing, and Madge was trying to make her brother sing, too; but Bob"s voice was changing and what he did to the notes of the familiar tunes was a caution.
But it was Tom Cameron who had come to Ruth. "See here," said the boy, eagerly. "See what I picked up on the rocks over there."
"Over where?" asked Ruth, looking curiously at the folded paper in Tom"s hand.
"Across from where you fell in, Ruth. Nita and that Crab fellow were standing there when I went down the rocks and dived in for you. And I saw them looking at this sheet of newspaper," and Tom began to slowly unfold it as he spoke.
CHAPTER XVII
WHAT WAS IN THE NEWSPAPER
"Whatever have you got there, Tom?" asked Ruth, curiously.
"Hush! I reckon Crab lost it when you fell in the water and stirred us all up so," returned the boy, with a grin.
"Lost that paper?"
"Yes. You see, it"s a page torn from the Sunday edition of a New York daily. On this side is a story of some professor"s discoveries in ancient Babylon."
"Couldn"t have interested Jack Crab much," remarked Ruth, smiling.
"That"s what I said myself," declared Tom, hastily. "Therefore, I turned it over. And _this_ is what Crab was showing that Nita girl, I am sure."
Ruth looked at the ill.u.s.trated sheet that Tom spread before her. There was a girl on a very spirited cow pony, swinging a lariat, the loop of which was about to settle over the broadly spreading horns of a Texas steer. The girl was dressed in a very fancy "cow-girl" costume, and the picture was most spirited indeed. In one corner, too, was a reproduction of a photograph of the girl described in the newspaper article.
"Why! it doesn"t look anything like Nita," gasped Ruth, understanding immediately why Tom had brought the paper to her.
"Nope. You needn"t expect it to. Those papers use any old photograph to make ill.u.s.trations from. But read the story."
It was all about the niece of a very rich cattle man in Montana who had run away from the ranch on which she had lived all her life. It was called Silver Ranch, and was a very noted cattle range in that part of the West. The girl"s uncle raised both horses and cattle, was very wealthy, had given her what attention a single man could in such a situation, and was now having a countrywide search made for the runaway.
"Jane Ann Hicks Has Run Away From a Fortune" was the way the paper put it in a big "scare head" across the top of the page; and the text went on to tell of rough Bill Hicks, of Bullhide, and how he had begun in the early cattle days as a puncher himself and had now risen to the sole proprietorship of Silver Ranch.
"Bill"s one possession besides his cattle and horses that he took any joy in was his younger brother"s daughter, Jane Ann. She is an orphan and came to Bill and he has taken sole care of her (for a woman has never been at Silver Ranch, save Indian squaws and a Mexican cook woman) since she could creep. Jane Ann is certainly the apple of Old Bill"s eye.
"But, as Old Bill has told the Bullhide chief of police, who is sending the pictures and description of the lost girl all over the country, "Jane Ann got some powerful hifalutin" notions." She is now a well-grown girl, smart as a whip, pretty, afraid of nothing on four legs, and just as ignorant as a girl brought up in such an environment would be. Jane Ann has been reading novels, perhaps. As the Eastern youth used to fill up on cheap stories of the Far West, and start for that wild and woolly section with the intention of wiping from the face of Nature the last remnant of the Red Tribes, so it may be that Jane Ann Hicks has read of the Eastern millionaire and has started for the Atlantic seaboard for the purpose of la.s.soing one--or more--of those elusive creatures.
"However, Old Bill wants Jane Ann to come home. Silver Ranch will be hers some day, when Old Bill pa.s.ses over the Great Divide, and he believes that if she is to be Montana"s coming Cattle Queen his niece would better not know too much about the effete East."
And in this style the newspaper writer had spread before his readers a semi-humorous account (perhaps fict.i.tious) of the daily life of the missing heiress of Silver Ranch, her rides over the prairies and hills on half-wild ponies, the round-ups, calf-brandings, horse-breakings, and all other activities supposed to be part and parcel of ranch life.
"My goodness me!" gasped Ruth, when she had hastily scanned all this, "do you suppose that any sane girl would have run away from all that for just a foolish whim?"
"Just what I say," returned Tom. "Cracky! wouldn"t it be great to ride over that range, and help herd the cattle, and trail wild horses, and--and----"
"Well, that"s just what one girl got sick of, it seems," finished Ruth, her eyes dancing. "Now! whether this same girl is the one we know----"
"I bet she is," declared Tom.
"Betting isn"t proof, you know," returned Ruth, demurely.
"No. But Jane Ann Hicks is this young lady who wants to be called "Nita"--Oh, glory! what a name!"
"If it is so," Ruth rejoined, slowly, "I don"t so much wonder that she wanted a fancy name. "Jane Ann Hicks"! It sounds ugly; but an ugly name can stand for a truly beautiful character."
"That fact doesn"t appeal to this runaway girl, I guess," said Tom.
"But the question is: What shall we do about it?"
"I don"t know as we can do anything about it," Ruth said, slowly. "Of course we don"t know that this Hicks girl and Nita are the same."