CHAPTER XXIIBLOOMBERG STRIKES
Ruth looked at Tom for a moment, completely stunned by the force of this revelation.
“Gone!” she exclaimed. “Tell me! Who found out about the missing magazines and when?”
“Bert Traymore—just a short time ago,” Tom answered jerkily. He drew off the boot and saw with a pang of pity that Ruth’s ankle was swollen and puffy. “As soon as he told me I came to find you.”
“Have you done anything—sent any one to track down the thief?” Ruth’s voice was quiet as she put the questions. No time now for hysteria, she told herself sternly. This occasion called for all the grit and stamina she possessed. No need to ask who was at the bottom of the theft. This was Bloomberg’s revenge—the blow she had been waiting for and dreading ever since she had heard that her enemy was at Knockout Point. To outwit such a man as Bloombergcalled for calm nerve and a cool mind. To give way now would be merely to play into Sol Bloomberg’s hands.
Tom nodded in reply to her question.
“I’ve already sent several of the boys to scout about. And I’ve detailed a couple of them to shadow Bloomberg and watch his slightest move. By the way,” he looked up with the faintest grim lifting of the corners of his mouth, “we have one bit of startling information from the most promising young detective in our midst.”
“Eben!” cried Ruth. “What is it, Tom? Oh, hurry!”
“He says he saw Charlie Reid coming out of The Big Chance the other evening. It was just on the edge of dusk, and he says he can’t swear to the man’s identity, but he’s just about certain it was Reid. He lived in the same apartment house with Reid a winter or so ago, and knows the fellow. Of course,” Tom added, with a deprecating shrug of his shoulders, “the kid’s mistaken. Charlie Reid is safe in New York right now.”
“No!” said Ruth quickly, “I believe Eben is right, Tom; and I’ll tell you why.”
In short, jerky, breathless sentences she told him then of the impression both she and Helen had had that they were being followed and of the two occasions when they had caught sight ofsome one who looked strikingly like Charlie Reid.
“So!” said Tom, his eyes narrowed to a steely glitter. “We havethatrascal to deal with, too, have we? Well, the more the merrier!”
“You—you don’t think the ankle is broken, do you, Tom?” she asked, regarding the injured member anxiously. “It—it wiggles!”
“Then it isn’t broken,” said Tom, admiring her pluck and the unquenchable humor that never failed her even in the most desperate predicament. “I think it’s only bruised by the pressure, and perhaps a strained tendon or two. Luckily I came on horseback—and the mare’s husky enough to carry us both.”
Before Ruth could protest he lifted her in his arms and carried her over to the spot where he had left his horse grazing on the stubby grass.
They rode back to Knockout Point to find the entire company in a state of excitement and alarm.
Carried to her room by Tom, who still would not let her put her foot to the ground, Ruth sent at once for her assistant directors and the cameramen.
“What you need is to rest for a little, Ruthie,” protested Helen. To the latter and Chess, Tom had explained briefly how he had found Ruth and released her from the steel jaws of the trap. “Your poor foot must pain you terribly.”
“It’s nothing!” cried Ruth, impatient of anything that might delay her search for the missing films. “By to-morrow the ankle will be well again. But the magazines! Tom, why don’t those people hurry?”
They came before she had finished speaking the words—a solemn-visaged group of men, fully realizing the gravity of the situation.
“Sit down, please,” she said curtly. “Now please tell me whose fault it is that this thing happened to-day. I suppose you know,” she added, her steady gaze holding them, “just what it means!”
“We know only too well, Miss Fielding,” said Bert Traymore, with a worried frown. “We had the take-up boxes locked in the big chest. There was a padlock besides——”
“And that was forced as well as the lock,” said Schultz.
“What was taken?” Ruth’s anxiety made the words sting like the lash of a whip.
“Magazines seven and ten,” said Atwater, and added in a gloomy voice, as though he thought the worst might as well be told at once: “Miss Lang’s big scene was in number ten.”
Ruth sprang to her feet; then knitted her brows in an effort to keep back an exclamation of pain and impatience. That ankle again!
“I must go at once and see—” she began, butTom interrupted her with more than his usual firmness.
“You can’t go anywhere just now. See, you can hardly walk!”
“Was there no clew to the thief?” asked Ruth, after a moment.
“Nothing but a few greasy fingermarks, Miss Fielding,” replied Schultz.
“But we’ve got to get back those films!” cried Ruth, her eyes suddenly blazing in her white face as she turned fiercely upon the three cameramen. “You are responsible for the magazines. You allowed two of them to be stolen. Now you’ve got to get them back for me! Do you hear? Get them back for me!”
When Schultz and Traymore and Atwater left the conference some time later they were three very much subdued and anxious men. No one wanted more than they to recover the missing magazines and no one knew better than they how difficult, perhaps impossible, a task this would be.
For a long time after they had left her Ruth sat silent in the big chair, chin on palm, eyes brooding.
“It’s hard, hard luck, Helen,” she said, when the latter would have comforted her. “Or rather, I might say, it’s Bloomberg! He seems to have been a little too clever for me, after all. My, how tired I am!”
This mood of desolation lasted through a phantom-filled, restless night, but was partially dissolved by the sun of a brilliant northern day. When the first rays of the sun streamed across her face Ruth threw back the covers and anxiously regarded her injured ankle.
“You aren’t nearly so swollen as you were yesterday,” she said presumably addressing the ankle. “And I don’t believe you will be nearly so painful!”
Very gingerly and carefully she tested the truth of this bold assertion, resting the foot lightly on the floor, then adding more pressure when the expected pain failed to register.
To her delight she found that she could walk. The ankle was naturally still sore and painful, but by hobbling and by taking the burden of her weight mostly on the well foot she could manage to get about without too much discomfort.
Pausing in the midst of these experiments to find Helen’s eyes fixed sleepily upon her, Ruth smiled.
“I’m only a make-believe cripple,” she cried, with an attempt at gayety. “Who knows? Ruth Fielding may defeat Sol Bloomberg yet!”
But though the injury to Ruth’s ankle was far less serious than she had dared to hope, still the young director found herself greatly handicapped in the serious work of the day. It was plain toher that she must favor the ankle and go lightly on it for that day at least. To use it too much while it was still so tender meant that she might be laid up for days to come.
“You and Chess will have to follow the thief,” she told Tom after breakfast that morning. “If Eben was right about seeing Charlie Reid at The Big Chance, then I believe he is certainly the fellow Bloomberg would employ and the man you have to find. His trail ought still to be fresh and comparatively easy to follow if you start at once. Perhaps you may find the films and bring them back to me by night. Oh, boys, please try! You know what it means to me—to us, Tom!”
“We’ll get those films if it takes a leg!” promised Tom.
“If it takes both of ’em!” Chess added vehemently.
The girls watched the two boys ride off in a cloud of dust, waving to them until they could no longer be seen.
In spite of Helen’s earnest efforts to keep her chum quiet and save the ankle from further injury, Ruth could not sit still. She was the victim of an intolerable restlessness; inertia was positive agony to her.
She had another conference with her cameramen. They took her to the chest in which they had locked up the precious, daylight loaded films.
With lugubrious countenance Schultz, Traymore and Atwater showed her the padlock that had been forced in their absence, the place where the stolen magazines had rested.
The films necessary for the day’s work of the cameramen are contained in daylight loading boxes, or magazines. These magazines are carefully loaded in a dark room and so become daylight loading in the camera. Ruth knew that in the motion picture camera, these magazines are interchangeable, the film passing out of the top magazine through the mechanism of the camera and into the lower magazine. Here it is wound up and carefully protected against light, to be developed later in the laboratory. The lower box is called the “take-up magazine,” and when this is removed the top magazine is put in its place and a freshly loaded box takes the place of the empty one.
It was two of these precious take-up magazines, neatly labeled as to the exact nature of their contents, that had been filched from the chest.
“I wonder,” said Ruth moodily, “why the thief did not take them all?”
“If there were only one or two men operating they could not get away with any more,” said Traymore, haggard lines of worry on his usually merry countenance. “I can’t tell you how sorry Iam that this has happened, Miss Fielding. I could hardly sleep last night——”
“I guess none of us could!” Again Ruth’s worry made her words more brusque than she intended. “We must have the locks replaced at once, and please see that some one guards this chest night and day from now on. Although,” she added unhappily, speaking more to herself than to Traymore, “it is very much like locking the stable after the favorite colt is gone!”
After this conference it was impossible for Ruth to remain quiet.
“Let’s get a couple of mounts somewhere and ride up in the woods a way,” she suggested to Helen. “Certainly that can’t hurt my miserable old ankle.”
“We might ride as far as the Chase cabin,” said Helen, a bit doubtfully. “They would be glad to see you.”
“The very thing! I want to learn how they are making out in protecting their claim.”
“Oh, I guess they are all right.”
“Let us hope so,” and Ruth sighed. “Oh, my, what a lot of trouble all of us are having!” she added.