Ruth Fielding Down East | Page 4

on you hasn't followed you here."
"Don't talk foolishly, Tom!" exclaimed the girl, getting back some of her usual good sense. "Of course, I have no enemy. But a thief is every honest person's enemy."
"Granted. But where is the thief around the Red Mill?"
"I do not know."
"Can it be possible that your uncle or Ben saw the things here and rescued them just before the storm burst?"
"We will ask," she said, with a sigh. "But I can imagine no reason for either Uncle Jabez or Ben to come down here to the shore of the river. Oh, Tom! it is letting up."
"Good! I'll look around first of all. If there has been a skulker near----"
"Now, don't be rash," she cried.
"We're not behind the German lines now, Fraulein Mina von Brenner," and he laughed as he went out of the summer-house.
He did not smile when he was searching under the house and beating the brush clumps near by. He realized that this loss was a very serious matter for Ruth.
She was now independent of Uncle Jabez, but her income was partly derived from her moving picture royalties. During her war activities she had been unable to do much work, and Tom knew that Ruth had spent of her own means a great deal in the Red Cross work.
Ruth had refused to tell her friends the first thing about this new story for the screen. She believed it to be the very best thing she had ever originated, and she said she wished to surprise them all.
He even knew that all her notes and "before-the-finish" writing was in the notebooks that had now gone with the completed manuscript. It looked more than mysterious. It was suspicious.
Tom looked all around the summer-house. Of course, after this hard downpour it was impossible to mark any footsteps. Nor, indeed, did the raider need to leave such a trail in getting to and departing from the little vine-covered pavilion. The sward was heavy all about it save on the river side.
The young man found not a trace. Nor did he see a piece of paper anywhere. He was confident that Ruth's papers and notebooks and pen had been removed by some human agency. And it could not have been a friend who had done this thing.
CHAPTER III
THE DERELICT
"Didn't you find anything, Tom?" Ruth Fielding asked, as Helen's twin re-entered the summer-house.
His long automobile coat glistened with wet and his face was wind-blown. Tom Cameron's face, too, looked much older than it had--well, say a year before. He, like Ruth herself, had been through much in the war zone calculated to make him more sedate and serious than a college undergraduate is supposed to be.
"I did not see even a piece of paper blowing about," he told her.
"But before we came down from the house you said you saw a paper blow over the roof like a kite."
"That was an outspread newspaper. It was not a sheet of your manuscript."
"Then it all must have been stolen!" she cried.
"At least, human agency must have removed the things you left on this table," he said.
"Oh, Tom!"
"Now, now, Ruth! It's tough, I know----"
But she recovered a measure of her composure almost immediately. Unnerved as she had first been by the disaster, she realized that to give way to her trouble would not do the least bit of good.
"An ordinary thief," Tom suggested after a moment, "would not consider your notes and the play of much value."
"I suppose not," she replied.
"If they are stolen it must be by somebody who understands--or thinks he does--the value of the work. Somebody who thinks he can sell a moving picture scenario."
"Oh, Tom!"
"A gold mounted fountain pen would attract any petty thief," he went on to say. "But surely the itching fingers of such a person would not be tempted by that scenario."
"Then, which breed of thief stole my scenario, Tom?" she demanded. "You are no detective. Your deductions suggest two thieves."
"Humph! So they do. Maybe they run in pairs. But I can't really imagine two light-fingered people around the Red Mill at once. Seen any tramps lately?"
"We seldom see the usual tramp around here," said Ruth, shaking her head. "We are too far off the railroad line. And the Cheslow constables keep them moving if they land there."
"Could anybody have done it for a joke?" asked Tom suddenly.
"If they have," Ruth said, wiping her eyes, "it is the least like a joke of anything that ever happened to me. Why, Tom! I couldn't lay out that scenario again, and think of all the details, and get it just so, in a year!"
"Oh, Ruth!"
"I mean it! And even my notes are gone. Oh, dear! I'd never have the heart to write that scenario again. I don't know that I shall ever write another, anyway. I'm discouraged,"