Ruth Fielding Down in Dixie; Great Times in the Land of Cotton

As they went through the passage from the outer deck to the saloon they saw a figure stalking ahead of them which made Helen all but cry out.

“I see her,” Ruth whispered. “It’s the same girl.”

“And she’s going into that stateroom,” added Helen, as the person unlocked the door of an inside room.

“I’d like to see her face,” Ruth said, smiling. “I see she has curly hair, and I believe it’s short.”

“We’ll look her up after the steamboat gets off. Her room is number forty-eight,” Helen said. “Come on, dear! Feel the jar of the engines? They must be casting off the hawsers.”

The girls went up another flight of broad, polished stairs and came out upon the hurricane deck. They were above the roof of the dock and could look down upon it and see the people bidding their friends on the boat good-bye while the vessel backed out into the stream. The starting was conducted with such precision that they heard few orders given, and only once did the engine-room gong clang excitedly.

The steamer soon swung its stern upstream, and the bow came around, clearing the end of the pier next below, and so heading down the North River. Certain tugboats and wide ferries tooted their defiance at the ocean-going craft, for the vessel on which Ruth and Helen were traveling was one of the largest coast-wise steamers sailing out of the port.

It was a lovely afternoon toward the close of June. The city had been as hot as a roasting pan, Helen said; but on the high deck the breeze, breathed from the Jersey hills, lifted the damp locks from the girls’ brows. A soft mist crowned the Palisades. The sun, already descending, drew another veil before his face as he dropped behind the Orange Mountains, his red rays glistening splendidly upon the towers and domes of lower Broadway.

They passed the Battery in a few minutes, with the round, pot-bellied aquarium and the immigration offices. The upper bay was crowded with craft of all kind. The Staten Island ferries drummed back and forth, the perky little ferryboat to Ellis Island and the tugboat to the Statue of Liberty crossed their path. In their wake the small craft dipped in the swell of the propeller’s turmoil.

The Statue of Liberty herself stood tall and stately in the afternoon sunlight, holding her green, bronze torch aloft. The girls could not look at this monument without being impressed by its stateliness and noble features.

“And we’ve read about it, and thought so much about this present of Miss Picolet’s nation to ours! It is very wonderful,” Ruth said.

“And that fort! See it?” cried Helen, pointing to Governor’s Island on the other bow. “Oh, and see, Ruth! that great, rusty, iron steamship anchored out yonder. She must be a great, sea-going tramp.”

Every half minute there was something new for the chums to exclaim over.

In fifteen minutes they were passing through the Narrows. The two girls were staring back at Fort Wadsworth on Staten Island, when a petty officer above on the lookout post hailed the bridge amidships.

“Launch coming up, sir. Port, astern.”

There was a sudden rush of those passengers in the bows who heard to the port side. “Oh, come on. Let’s see!” cried Helen, and away the two girls went with the crowd.

The perky little launch shoved up close to the side of the tall steamer. It flew a pennant which the girls did not understand; but some gentleman near them said laughingly:

“That is a police launch. I guess we’re all arrested. See! they’re coming aboard.”

The steamer did not slow down at all; but one of the men in the bow of the pitching launch threw a line with a hook on the end of it, and this fastened itself over the rail of the lower deck. By leaning over the rail above Ruth and Helen could see all that went on below.

In a moment deckhands caught the line and hauled up with it a rope ladder. This swung perilously – so the girls thought – over the green-and-white leaping waves.

A man started up the swinging ladder. The steamer dipped ever so little and he scrambled faster to keep out of the water’s reach.

“The waves act just like hungry wolves, or like dogs, leaping after their prey,” said Ruth reflectively. “See them! They almost caught his legs that time.”

Another man started up the ladder the moment the first one had swarmed over the rail. Then another came, and a fourth. Four men in all boarded the still fast-moving steamer. Everybody was talking eagerly about it, and nobody knew what it meant.

These men were surely not passengers who had been belated, for the launch still remained attached to the steamer.

Ruth and Helen went back into the saloon. There they saw their smiling porter, now in the neat black dress of a waiter, bustling about. “Any little t’ing I kin do fo’ yo’, missy?” he asked.

“No, thank you,” Ruth replied, smiling. But Helen burst out with: “Do tell us what those men have come aboard for?”

“Dem men from de po-lice launch?” inquired the black man.

“Yes. What are they after? Are they police?”

“Ya-as’m. Dem’s po-lice,” said the darkey, rolling his eyes. “Dey tell me dey is wantin’ a boy wot’s been stealin’ – an’ he’s done got girl’s clo’es on, missy.”

“A boy in girl’s clothing?” gasped Ruth.

“‘A wolf in sheep’s clothing!’” laughed her chum.

“Ya-as indeedy, missy. Das wot dey say.”

“Are they sure he came aboard this boat?” asked Ruth anxiously.

“Sho is, missy. Dey done trailed him right to de dock. Das wot de head steward heard ’em say. De taxicab man remembered him – he acted so funny in dem girl’s clo’es – he, he, he! Das one silly trick, das wot dat is,” chuckled the darkey. “No boy gwine t’ look like his sister in her clo’es – no, indeedy.”

But Ruth and Helen were now staring at each other with the same thought in their minds. “Oh, Helen!” murmured Ruth. And, “Oh, Ruth!” responded Helen.

“Ought we to tell?” pursued Helen, putting all the burden of deciding the question on her chum as usual. “It’s that very strange looking girl we saw going into number forty-eight; isn’t it?”

“It is most certainly that person,” agreed Ruth positively.

CHAPTER II – THE WORM TURNS

Ruth Fielding was plentifully supplied with good sense. Under ordinary circumstances she would not have tried to shield any person who was a fugitive from justice.

But in this case there seemed to her no reason for Helen and her to volunteer information – especially when such information as they might give was based on so infirm a foundation. They had seen an odd looking girl disappear into one of the staterooms. They had really nothing more than a baseless conclusion to back up the assertion that the individual in question was disguised, or was the boy wanted by the police.

Of course, whatever Ruth said was best, and Helen would agree to it. The latter had learned long since that her chum was gifted with judgment beyond her years, and if she followed Ruth Fielding’s lead she would not go far wrong.

Indeed, Helen began to admire her chum soon after Ruth first appeared at Jabez Potter’s Red Mill, on the banks of the Lumano, near which Helen’s father had built his all-year-around home. Ruth had come to the old Red Mill as a “charity child.” At least, that is what miserly Jabez Potter considered her. Nor was he chary at first of saying that he had taken his grand-niece in because there was no one else to whom she could go.

Young as she then was, Ruth felt her position keenly. Had it not been for Aunt Alvirah (who was nobody’s relative, but everybody’s aunt), whom the miller had likewise “taken in out of charity” to keep house for him and save the wages of a housekeeper, Ruth would never have been able to stay at the Red Mill. Her uncle’s harshness and penurious ways mortified the girl, and troubled her greatly as time went on.

Ruth succeeded in finding her uncle’s cashbox that had been stolen from him at the time a freshet carried away a part of the old mill. These introductory adventures are told in the initial volume of the series, called: “Ruth Fielding of the Red Mill; or, Jacob Parloe’s Secret.”

Because he felt himself in Ruth’s debt, her Uncle Jabez agreed to pay for her first year’s tuition and support at a girls’ boarding school to which Mr. Cameron was sending Helen. Helen was Ruth’s dearest friend, and the chums, in the second volume, “Ruth Fielding at Briarwood Hall,” entered school life hand in hand, making friends and rivals alike, and having adventures galore.

The third volume took Ruth and her friends to Snow Camp, a winter lodge in the Adirondack wilderness. The fourth tells of their summer adventures at Lighthouse Point on the Atlantic Coast. The fifth book deals with the exciting times the girls and their boy friends had with the cowboys at Silver Ranch, out in Montana. The sixth story is about Cliff Island and its really wonderful caves, and what was hidden in them. Number seven relates the adventures of a “safe and sane” Fourth of July at Sunrise Farm and the rescue of the Raby orphans. While “Ruth Fielding and the Gypsies,” the eighth volume of the series, relates a very important episode in Ruth’s career; for by restoring a valuable necklace to an aunt of one of her school friends she obtains a reward of five thousand dollars.

This money, placed to Ruth’s credit in the bank by Mr. Cameron, made the girl of the Red Mill instantly independent of Uncle Jabez, who had so often complained of the expense Ruth was to him. Much to Aunt Alvirah’s sorrow, Uncle Jabez became more exacting and penurious when Ruth’s school expenses ceased to trouble him.

“I could almost a-wish, my pretty, that you hadn’t got all o’ that money, for Jabez Potter was l’arnin’ to let go of a dollar without a-squeezin’ all the tail feathers off the eagle that’s onto it,” said the rheumatic, little, old woman. “Oh, my back! and oh, my bones! It’s nice for you to have your own livin’ pervided for, Ruthie. But it’s awful for Jabez Potter to get so selfish and miserly again.”

Aunt Alvirah had said this to the girl of the Red Mill just before Ruth started for Briarwood Hall at the opening of her final term at that famous school. In the story immediately preceding the present narrative, “Ruth Fielding in Moving Pictures; Or, Helping the Dormitory Fund,” Ruth and her school chums were much engaged in that modern wonder, the making of “movie” films. Ruth herself had written a short scenario and had had it accepted by Mr. Hammond, president of the Alectrion Film Corporation, when one of the school dormitories was burned. To help increase the fund for a new structure, the girls all desired to raise as much money as possible.

Ruth was inspired to write a second scenario – a five-reel drama of schoolgirl life – and Mr. Hammond produced it for the benefit of the Hall. “The Heart of a Schoolgirl” made a big hit and brought Ruth no little fame in her small world.