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Excited as she was, Ruth Fielding had not lost her usual sense of caution. Uncle Jabez Potter’s serious need on the roof of the Red Mill called for instant help; but Ruth stopped long enough on the ell roof of the farmhouse, having climbed one ladder, to discard the sports skirt that retarded her free movements.

“Oh, Ruth!” shrieked Helen again from below.

“Take care, my pretty!” wailed Aunt Alvirah, and then rose with her usual murmur of “Oh, my back! and oh, my bones!” to hobble out into the sunshine, the better to see what Ruth was doing.

Ruth started up the second, and longer, ladder in her bloomers and found herself much less trammeled. But the ladder wabbled threateningly, although she knew Ben, the hired man, had placed it as firmly as a ladder could be placed. It was the length of the ladder that made it spring so.

She was a clear-headed and athletic girl. She had never shrunk from a hard task when it faced her. Indeed, Ruth, from the very time the reader first meets her in the initial volume of this series, entitled “Ruth Fielding of the Red Mill,” had proved herself a remarkably courageous person.

As an orphan she had come to her great-uncle’s mill and home, and Jabez Potter had taken her in “out of charity” as he at first grudgingly expressed it. Many a time since that long-past occasion the miserly miller had admitted (secretly if not openly) that he had been amply repaid for giving Ruth shelter.

Helen Cameron and her twin brother, Tom, had been Ruth’s first young friends in this neighborhood. With Helen she had attended Briarwood Hall and, later still, Ardmore College. While the Great War was on both Ruth and Helen were in France and did more than their bit for humanity in the Red Cross service.

But before Ruth had gone to France and since she had returned, her heart and mind had been firmly fixed upon motion picture making. She had achieved no little success in writing scripts for pictures and, of late, had helped direct them.

She had, only the week before, returned from a seven-weeks’ sojourn at the Thousand Islands, where she had been engaged, with a company from the Alectrion Film Corporation studios, in making a picture in which an Indian girl whom Ruth had befriended played a prominent part.

In this story, “Ruth Fielding on the St. Lawrence,” the young woman had been more than ever convinced that if she was to make the kind of pictures she desired to make, she must have a free hand. Although Mr. Hammond, the president of the Alectrion Corporation, was her friend and had always treated her liberally, he now had so many irons in the fire that Ruth began to feel that she was merely one of his “hired hands.”

As she had just now said to Aunt Alvirah, her uncle’s old housekeeper, and to Helen, her chum, she wished to have her own producing company and to feel that her word was to be final in the making of the pictures she wrote. She had the germ of a splendid idea for a feature film in her mind, she wanted to use Wonota, the Osage Indian girl in it. All she lacked was the financial backing that such an undertaking must have.

Thoughts of the picture and her financial situation were quite driven out of Ruth’s mind, however, by Uncle Jabez Potter’s peril on the roof of the old mill. He had fainted up there in the sun—or something even more serious had happened to him—and there was nobody near who could help the old man but Ruth.

The quivering of the long ladder to the peak of the mill roof made Ruth ascend very carefully. But she continued to look up and told herself over and over that the ladder would bear her weight a dozen times. At last she reached the roof and scrambled up on the board that Ben had laid to the scaffold where Uncle Jabez had been at work.

The old man lay with his legs half over the edge of the scaffold. She saw now that his position was more secure than she had thought. And before she reached him the old man began to move again, struggling to sit up.

“Uncle Jabez! Uncle Jabez! Wait!” cried Ruth. “Let me help you.”

“I calkerlate somebody’s got to help me,” muttered the miller. “Ruth, that you? I declare I can’t scurce see a thing. Guess your Aunt Alvirah was right. That sun struck me right in the pit of the stomach, seems so. All went black before my eyes. I don’t see how I am going to get down off’n this roof, Niece Ruth.”

“I am going to help you, Uncle Jabez,” the girl said confidently. “This sun is awful!”

There was no use in telling him now that he had been warned. Nor was Ruth one of those “I-told-you-so” people. Besides, the old miller was in no condition to be scolded for his folly.

She helped him to his feet, but he was very uncertain on them, and for a minute or two Ruth feared she could not get him along the narrow plank to the top of the ladder. If he pitched off the board she knew she could not hold him, although he was not a heavy man.

If Uncle Jabez was stubborn in one thing, he was in all. He was determined to get down to the ground, and he did so. But he confessed that he never would have made it without his niece’s help!

From the ell roof of the house Ruth called impatiently to Helen to get into her car and go for the doctor. Uncle Jabez was too confused in his mind to veto the command, although at another time he would have thought instantly of the expense of the doctor’s visit.

He really had suffered a slight sunstroke. His age and physical condition doubtless had something to do with his present misfortune—and that the physician stated in so many words when he arrived. He had warned the miller more than a year before that he should retire from active work; and the fact that he had not done so added greatly to the danger of his present attack.

In any case, within a few hours it became evident to all about him that the old man would not be able to attend to business of any kind or to exert himself physically to any degree for a long time to come.

Aside from the alarm Ruth felt because of the miller’s misfortune, there was a personal thought that rasped her mind continually. The matter of getting Uncle Jabez to back her financially in the making of her first independent picture had gone by the board.

He was forbidden to think of business. The mill would be run by Ben for a while, or until the present contracts were filled and the grain on hand made into flour or meal. Then the Red Mill, for the first time in many generations, would be shut down and—perhaps—the stones would never turn again.

In spite of her sympathy for Uncle Jabez and her fears for his future, Ruth Fielding could not keep her thoughts from dwelling on her own ill-fortune. The accident at this time seemed to be a calamity for her.

Tom Cameron was like his sister Helen—“as like as two peas in a pod,” Aunt Alvirah Boggs often said. He had the same black hair and black eyes and the clear, olive complexion that was a legacy from his half-Spanish mother now long since dead. As Helen had intimated to Ruth, he had, too, his share of their mother’s fortune and would have been glad to aid Ruth in her desire for a producing company had the girl of the Red Mill been willing to accept such help.

The latter, however, had a strong and deep-rooted objection to accepting any such help from any such quarter!

Not that Ruth did not consider Tom Cameron almost as much her chum as she did his sister. Indeed, it was exactly in that character that Ruth wished to think of Tom and have Tom think of her.

Even before the war Tom had shown Ruth that he considered her the one girl in the world for him. He could not seriously see any other girl as a possible mate for life. And, secretly, Ruth would have been greatly disappointed if Tom had turned to any other girl.

But she would not become engaged to him. She did not believe in long engagements. And now, with the war finished six months and more before, she began to feel very strongly that there was something wrong with Tom Cameron.

She had thought him ambitious in those early days when they used to have their enthusiastic talks about the future. Mr. Cameron was a dry goods merchant in Boston. He had but recently opened a branch in New York, and it was an important situation Tom might step into, and learn to fill. But since he had come back from France after the armistice, Tom seemed only to dilly-dally and shirk his job.

He was shirking it not a little one day, and instead of working was lounging along Front and South Streets, in New York City, watching the tramp steamships being laden and viewing the long bowsprits of the great four and five-masted ships thrust almost into the driveway of the water-front streets.

There is always color and a certain bustle along the wharves. And, here and there, a silent, empty, roofed dock will yawn, offering shade on a hot day, with a faint, “smelly” breath of river air sucking up from the open end of the dock.

Having walked far, and the sun being hot, Tom entered one of these inviting tunnels and strolled to the very end from which he could see all four of the bridges that span the East River, as well as the varied traffic thereon, and the serried banks of warehouses and other tall buildings on either side of the stream.

Tom had been walking to get away from his own thoughts. Unfortunately, he had found the thoughts quite up to his mark in pedestrianism. They had kept in step with him!

Suddenly it was his luck—he was afterward sure it was good luck—to spy the hoop-shouldered figure of a man on the opposite side of the dock, sitting on a soap-box. The stranger’s back was toward Tom, but the latter saw that there was room for two to sit on that box. He walked across the broad dock and said, “Hello!”

The other looked up, and Tom first saw a weather-beaten, deeply lined face that belonged to a man well past the half-century mark. It was a shrewd face, too, but not cunning. Though the eyes were surrounded by those wrinkles that always mark the eyes of a mariner, there was a trusting light in their watery depths that aided in forming Tom’s opinion that here was an old fellow whose long life at sea and acquired fund of sea-lore had not deprived him of a certain simplicity that was inherent.

The man was whittling a soft pine block into the shape of a little toy, and several untouched similar blocks, as well as partly finished toys, were in a basket at his feet.

No! At his foot! For the man’s right leg, sticking straight out before him as he sat on the box, ended in a wooden stump, painted green and with a brass ferrule on it. The old toy maker was a cripple.

“Ahoy, mate!” was his reply to Tom’s cheerful greeting. “Was you looking for some little knickknack to take home to the missus, or mebbe the kiddies?”

“Do I look as old as all that?” laughed Tom. “I’m not married yet, and no chance of it. Do you make these for a living?” he added.

“Well, it helps out. I got a pension. I’ve made ’em down here and peddled ’em along the wharves ever since I got my timber-toe. I was always handy with my knife.

“If I hadn’t been,” he added practically, “I’d have lost more’n my leg that time in Portygee Pedro’s joint at Nassau. They flung down a heavy mahogany bar onto me and pinned me by the foot and ankle to the floor. There I lay and fought ’em off—a gang of six black-faced rascals—till the coppers come, broke in the door, and rescued of me.”

Tom Cameron’s eyes began to sparkle. He looked aside at the man curiously. Whether he was entirely truthful or not, here was a fellow who could spin a real yarn of adventure if he would.

“This surely is my lucky day,” thought Tom.