Ruth Fielding Down East | Page 4

stole around her.
"Don't take on so, Ruthie," he urged. "Of course we'll find it all. Wait
till this rain stops----"
"It never blew away, Tom," she said.
"Why, of course it did!"

"No. The sheets of typewritten manuscript were fastened together with
a big brass clip. Had they been lose and the wind taken them, we
should have seen at least some of them flying about. And the
notebooks!"
"And the pen?" murmured Tom, seeing the catastrophe now as she did.
"Why, Ruthie! Could somebody have taken them all?"
"Somebody must!"
"But who?" demanded the young fellow. "You have no enemies."
"Not here, I hope," she sighed. "I left them all behind."
He chuckled, although he was by no means unappreciative of the
seriousness of her loss. "Surely that German aviator who dropped the
bomb 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