Ruth Fielding at Lighthouse Point: or, Nita, the Girl Castaway

Ruth was quite excited; but once she saw Nita and the man, Crab, walking farther along the rocks, and Ruth wondered that the fellow was so attentive to the runaway. But this was merely a passing thought. Her mind returned to the line she watched.

She pulled it up after a long while; the hook was bare. Either Mr. Tautog had been very, very careful when he nibbled the bait, or the said bait had slipped off. It was not easy to make the jelly-like body of the scallop remain on the hook. But Ruth was as anxious to catch a fish as the other girls, and she had watched Phineas with sharp and eager eyes when he baited the hook.

Ruth dropped it over the edge of the rock again after a minute. It sank down, down, down–Was that a nibble? She felt the faintest sort of a jerk on the line. Surely something was at the bait!

Again the jerk. Ruth returned the compliment by giving the line a prompt tug. Instantly she knew that she had hooked him!

“Oh! oh! oh!” she gasped, in a rising scale of delight and excitement.

She pulled in on the line. The fish was heavy, and he tried to pull his way, too. The blackfish is not much of a fighter, but he can sag back and do his obstinate best to remain in the water when the fisher is determined to get him out.

This fellow weighed two pounds and a half and was well hooked. Ruth, her cheeks glowing, her eyes dancing, hauled in, and in, and in–There he came out of the water, a plump, glistening body, that flapped and floundered in the air, and on the ledge at her feet. She desired mightily to cry out; but Phineas had warned them all to be still while they fished. Their voices might scare all the fish away.

She unhooked it beautifully, seizing it firmly in the gills. Phineas had shown her where to lay any she might catch in a little cradle in the rock behind her. It was a damp little hollow, and Mr. Tautog could not flop out into the sea again.

Oh! it was fun to bait the hook once more with trembling fingers, and heave the weighted line over the edge of the narrow ledge on which she stood. There might be another–perhaps even a bigger one–waiting down there to seize upon the bait.

And just then Mary Cox, her hair tousled and a distressfully discontented expression on her face, came around the corner of the big boulder.

“Oh! Hullo!” she said, discourteously. “You here?”

“Sh!” whispered Ruth, intent on the line and the pool of green water.

“What’s the matter with you?” snapped The Fox. “Don’t say you’ve got a bite! I’m sick of hearing them say it over there–”

“I’ve caught one,” said Ruth, with pride, pointing to the glistening tautog lying on the rock.

“Oh! Of course, ’twould be you who got it,” snarled Mary. “I bet he gave you the best place.”

“Please keep still!” begged Ruth. “I believe I’ve got another bite.”

“Have a dozen for all I care,” returned Mary. “I want to get past you.”

“Wait! I feel a nibble–”

But Mary pushed rudely by. She took the inside of the path, of course. The ledge was very narrow, and Ruth was stooping over the deep pool, breathlessly watching the line.

With a half-stifled scream Ruth fell forward, flinging out both hands. Mary clutched at her–she did try to save her. But she was not quick enough. Ruth dropped like a plummet and the green water closed over her with scarcely a splash.

Mary did not cry out. She was speechless with fear, and stood with clasped hands, motionless, upon the path.

“She can swim! she can swim!” was the thought that shuttled back and forth in The Fox’s brain.

But moment after moment passed and Ruth did not come to the surface. The pool was as calm as before, save for the vanishing rings that broke against the surrounding rocks. Mary held her breath. She began to feel as though it were a dream, and that her school companion had not really fallen into the pool. It must be an hallucination, for Ruth did not come to the surface again!

CHAPTER XV

TOM CAMERON TO THE RESCUE

The three boys were on the other side of the narrow inlet where the Miraflame lay. Phineas had told them that bass were more likely to be found upon the ocean side; therefore they were completely out of sight.

The last Tom, Bob and Isadora saw of the girls, the fishermen were placing them along the rocky path, and Mercy was lying in a deck chair on the deck of the launch, fluttering a handkerchief at them as they went around the end of the reef.

“I bet they don’t get a fish,” giggled Isadore. “And even Miss Kate’s got a line! What do girls know about fishing?”

“If there’s any tautog over there, I bet Helen and Ruth get ’em. They’re all right in any game,” declared the loyal Tom.

“Madge will squeal and want somebody to take the fish off her hook, if she does catch one,” grinned Bob. “She puts on lots of airs because she’s the oldest; but she’s a regular ‘scare-cat,’ after all.”

“Helen and Ruth are good fellows,” returned Tom, with emphasis. “They’re quite as good fun as the ordinary boy–of course, not you, Bobbins, or Busy Izzy here; but they are all right.”

“What do you think of that Nita girl?” asked Busy Izzy, suddenly.

“I believe there’s something to her,” declared Bob, with conviction. “She ain’t afraid of a living thing, I bet!”

“There is something queer about her,” Tom added, thoughtfully. “Have you noticed how that Crab fellow looks at her?”

“I see he hangs about her a good bit,” said Isadore, quickly. “Why, do you suppose?”

“That’s what I’d like to know,” returned Tom Cameron.

They were now where Phineas had told them bass might be caught, and gave their attention to their tackle. All three boys had fished for perch, pike, and other gamey fresh-water fish; but this was their first casting with a rod into salt water.

“A true disciple of Izaak Walton should be dumb,” declared Tom, warningly eyeing Isadore.

“Isn’t he allowed any leeway at all–not even when he lands a fish?” demanded the irrepressible.

“Not above a whisper,” grunted Bob Steele, trying to bait his hook with his thumb instead of the bait provided by Phineas. “Jingo!”

“Old Bobbins has got the first bite,” chuckled Tom, under his breath, as he made his cast.

The reel whirred and the hook fell with a light splash into a little eddy where the water seemed to swirl about a sunken rock.

“You won’t catch anything there,” said Isadore.

“I’ll gag you if you don’t shut up,” promised Tom.

Suddenly his line straightened out. The hook seemed to be sucked right down into a hole between the rocks, and the reel began to whir. It stopped and Tom tried it.

“Pshaw! that ain’t a bite,” whispered Isadore.

At Tom’s first attempt to reel in, the fish that had seized his hook started–for Spain! At least, it shot seaward, and the boy knew that Spain was about the nearest dry land if the fish kept on in that direction.

“A strike!” Tom gasped and let his reel sing for a moment or two. Then, when the drag of the line began to tell on the bass, he carefully wound in some of it. The fish turned and finally ran toward the rocks once more. Then Tom wound up as fast as he could, trying to keep the line taut.

“He’ll tangle you all up, Tommy,” declared Bob, unable, like Isadore, to keep entirely still.

Tom was flushed and excited, but said never a word. He played the big bass with coolness after all, and finally tired it out, keeping it clear of the tangles of weed down under the rock, and drew it forth–a plump, flopping, gasping victim.

Bob and Isadore were then eager to do as well and began whipping the water about the rocks with more energy than skill. Tom, delighted with his first kill, ran over the rocks with the fish to show it to the girls. As he surmounted the ridge of the rocky cape he suddenly saw Nita, the runaway, and Jack Crab, in a little cove right below him. The girl and the fisherman had come around to this side of the inlet, away from Phineas and the other girls.

They did not see Tom behind and above them. Nita was not fishing, and Crab had unfolded a paper and was showing it to her. At this distance the paper seemed like a page torn from some newspaper, and there were illustrations as well as reading text upon the sheet which Crab held before the strange girl’s eyes.

“There it is!” Tom heard the lighthouse keeper’s assistant say, in an exultant tone. “You know what I could get if I wanted to show this to the right parties. Now, what d’ye think of it, Sissy?”

What Nita thought, or what she said, Tom did not hear. Indeed, scarcely had the two come into his line of vision, and he heard these words, when something much farther away–across the inlet, in fact–caught the boy’s attention.

He could see his sister and some of the other girls fishing from the rocky path; but directly opposite where he stood was Ruth. He saw Mary Cox meet and speak with her, the slight struggle of the two girls for position on the narrow ledge, and Ruth’s plunge into the water.

“Oh, by George!” shouted Tom, as Ruth went under, and he dropped the flopping bass and went down the rocks at a pace which endangered both life and limb. His shout startled Nita and Jack Crab. But they had not seen Ruth fall, nor did they understand Tom’s great excitement.

The inlet was scarcely more than a hundred yards across; but it was a long way around to the spot where Ruth had fallen, or been pushed, from the rock. Tom never thought of going the long way to the place. He tore off his coat, kicked off his canvas shoes, and, reaching the edge of the water, dived in head first without a word of explanation to the man and girl beside him.

He dived slantingly, and swam under water for a long way. When he came up he was a quarter of the distance across the inlet. He shook the water from his eyes, threw himself breast high out of the sea, and shouted:

“Has she come up? I don’t see her!”

Nobody but Mary Cox knew what he meant. Helen and the other girls were screaming because they had seen Tom fling himself into the sea but they had not seen Ruth fall in.

Nor did Mary Cox find voice enough to tell them when they ran along the ledge to try and see what Tom was swimming for. The Fox stood with glaring eyes, trying to see into the deep pool. But the pool remain unruffled and Ruth did not rise to the surface.

“Has she come up?” again shouted Tom, rising as high as he could in the water, and swimming with an overhand stroke.

There seemed nobody to answer him; they did not know what he meant. The boy shot through the water like a fish. Coming near the rock, he rose up with a sudden muscular effort, then dived deep. The green water closed over him and, when Helen and the others reached the spot where Mary Cox stood, wringing her hands and moaning, Tom had disappeared as utterly as Ruth herself.

CHAPTER XVI

RUTH’S SECRET

“What has happened?”

“Where’s Ruth?”

“Mary Cox! why don’t you answer?”

The Fox for once in her career was stunned. She could only shake her head and wring her hands. Helen was the first of the other girls to suspect the trouble, and she cried:

“Ruth’s overboard! That’s the reason Tom has gone in. Oh, oh! why don’t they come up again?”

And almost immediately all the others saw the importance of that question. Ruth Fielding had been down fully a minute and a half now, and Tom had not come up once for air.

Nita had set off running around the head of the inlet, and Crab shuffled along in her wake. The strange girl ran like a goat over the rocks.

Phineas, who had been aboard the motor boat and busy with his famous culinary operations, now came lumbering up to the spot. He listened to a chorused explanation of the situation–tragic indeed in its appearance. Phineas looked up and down the rocky path, and across the inlet, and seemed to swiftly take a marine “observation.” Then he snorted.

“They’re all right!” he exclaimed.

“What?” shrieked Helen.

“All right?” repeated Heavy. “Why, Phineas–”

She broke off with a startled gurgle. Phineas turned quickly, too, and looked over the high boulder. There appeared the head of Ruth Fielding and, in a moment, the head of Tom Cameron beside it.

“You both was swept through the tunnel into the pool behind, sir,” said Phineas, wagging his head.

“Oh, I was never so scared in my life,” murmured Ruth, clambering down to the path, the water running from her clothing in little streams.

“Me, too!” grunted Tom, panting. “The tide sets in through that hole awfully strong.”

“I might have told you about it,” grunted Phineas; “but I didn’t suppose airy one of ye was going for to jump into the sea right here.”

“We didn’t–intentionally,” declared Ruth.

“How ever did it happen, Ruthie?” demanded Heavy.

There was a moment’s silence. Tom grew red in the face, but he kept his gaze turned from Mary Cox. Ruth answered calmly enough:

“It was my own fault. Mary was just coming along to pass me. I had a bite. Between trying to let her by and ‘tending my fish,’ I fell in–and now I have lost fish, line, and all.”

“Be thankful you did not lose your life, Miss Fielding,” said Aunt Kate. “Come right down to the boat and get those wet things off. You, too, Tom.”

At that moment Nita came to the spot. “Is she safe? Is she safe?” she cried.

“Don’t I look so?” returned Ruth, laughing gaily. “And here’s the fish I did catch. I mustn’t lose him.”

Nita stepped close to the girl from the Red Mill and tugged at her wet sleeve.

“What are you going to do to her?” she whispered.

“Do to who?”

“That girl.”

“What are you talking about?” demanded Ruth.

“I saw her,” said Nita. “I saw her push you. She ought to be thrown into the water herself.”

“Hush!” commanded Ruth. “You’re mistaken. You didn’t see straight, my dear.”

“Yes, I did,” declared the Western girl, firmly. “She’s been mean to you, right along. I’ve noticed it. She threw you in.”

“Don’t say such a thing again!” commanded Ruth, warmly. “You have no right.”

“Huh!” said Nita, eyeing her strangely. “It’s your own business, I suppose. But I am not blind.”

“I hope not,” sad Ruth, calmly. “But I hope, too, you will not repeat what you just said–to anyone.”

“Why–if you really don’t want me to,” said Nita, slowly.

“Truly, I don’t wish you to,” said Ruth, earnestly. “I don’t even admit that you are right, mind–”

“Oh, it’s your secret,” said Nita, shortly, and turned away.

And Ruth had a word to say to Tom, too, as they hurried side by side to the boat, he carrying the fish. “Now, Tommy–remember!” she said.

“I won’t be easy in my mind, just the same, while that girl is here,” growled Master Tom.

“That’s foolish. She never meant to do it.”

“Huh! She was scared, of course. But she’s mean enough–”

“Stop! somebody will hear you. And, anyway,” Ruth added, remembering what Nita had said, “it’s my secret.”

“True enough; it is.”

“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 Cox. 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 passed 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 bass, 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 Cox was certainly a very strange sort of a girl; but her present attitude 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 assistants, 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 bass, 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 illustrated 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 illustrations 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 lassoing 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 passes 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 fictitious) 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.”

“What was Crab showing her the paper for?”

“What can Crab have to do with it, anyway?” returned Ruth, although she had not forgotten the interest the assistant lighthouse keeper had shown in Nita from the first.

“Don’t know. But if he recognized her–”

“From the picture?” asked Ruth.

“Well! you look at it. That drawing of the girl on horseback looks more like her than the photographic half-tone,” said Tom. “She looks just that wild and harum-scarum!”