"By gravy!" he chortled, "that's a good one on the dominie. By gravy! wait till I tell----"

"Don't you tell anybody, Mr. Payne," interrupted Ruth, smiling, but firmly. "I am buying your secrecy as well as your edition of _one copy_."

"I get you! I get you!" declared the old fellow. "This is to be on the q.t.?"

"Positively."

"You sit right here. The front page is all made up on the stone, Marriages, Births, Death Notices, and all. I'll set the paragraph and slip it in at the top o' the column. My boy is out, but this young man can help me lift the page into the press. She's all warmed up, and I was going to start printing when Edgar comes back from breakfast."

He grabbed the piece of copy and went off into the printing room, chuckling. Half an hour later the first paper came from the press, and Ruth and Tom bent over it. The item the girl had written was plainly printed in the position she had chosen on the front page of the _Harpoon_.

"Now, you are to keep still about this," Ruth said, threatening Mr. Payne with a raised finger.

"I don't know a thing about it," he promised, pocketing the bill she took from her purse, and in high good humor over the joke.

Tom helped him take the front page from the press again. The printer unlocked the chase, and removed and distributed the three lines he had set up at Ruth's direction.

The crowd from Beach Plum Point came over in the cars about noontime. Aunt Kate had remained at the inn on this morning, and she and Ruth walked to the "location," which was a beautiful old shaded front yard at the far end of the village.

Helen and Jennie had come with the real actors, and were to appear in the picture. The story related incidents at a Sunday-school picnic, and most of the comedy had already been filmed on the lot.

The scene around the long sewing table under the trees, when the ladies'

aid was at work with needle and tongue, should be the princ.i.p.al incident of this reel devoted to the picnic.

The heroine, to the amazement of the village gossips, has run away with the schoolmaster and married him in the next county. A certain character in the picture runs in with this bombsh.e.l.l of news and explodes it in the midst of the group about the sewing table.

The day before this point had failed to make much impression upon the amateur members of the company engaged in this typical scene. The Herringport ladies were not at all interested in such a thing happening to the town's schoolmaster, for to tell the truth the local schoolmaster was an old married man with a house full of children and nothing at all romantic about him.

Ruth took Mr. Hooley aside and showed him the copy of the _Harpoon_ she had had printed, and whispered to him her idea of the change in the action of the scenario. He seized upon the scheme--and the paper--with gusto.

"You are a jewel, Miss Fielding!" he declared. "If this doesn't make those old tabbies come to life and act naturally, nothing ever will!"

Ruth left the matter in the director's hands and retired from the location. She had no intention herself of appearing in the picture. She found Mr. Hammond sitting in his automobile in a state of good-humor.

"You seem quite sure that the work will go better to-day, Mr. Hammond,"

Ruth observed, with curiosity as to the reason for his apparent enjoyment.

"Whether it does or not, Miss Ruth," he responded. "There is something that I fancy is going to be more than a little amusing."

He tapped a package wrapped in a soiled newspaper which lay on the seat beside him. "Thank goodness, I can still enjoy a joke."

"What is the joke? Let me enjoy it, too," she said.

"With the greatest of pleasure. I'll let you read it, if you like--as you did those other scenarios."

"What! Is it a movie story?" she asked.

"So I am a.s.sured. It is the contribution of John, the hermit. He brought it to me just before we started over here this morning. Poor old codger!

Just look here, Miss Ruth."

Mr. Hammond turned back the loose covering of the package on the automobile seat. Ruth saw a packet of papers, seemingly of roughly trimmed sheets of wrapping paper and of several sizes. At the top of the upper sheet was the t.i.tle of the hermit's scenario. It was called "Plain Mary."

She glanced down the page, noting that it was written in a large, upright, hand and with an indelible pencil.

Ruth Fielding had not the least idea that she was to take any particular interest in this picture-story. She smiled more because Mr. Hammond seemed so amused than for any other reason. Secretly she thought that most of these moving picture people were rather unkind to the strange old man who lived alone on the seaward side of the Beach Plum Point.

"Want to read it over?" Mr. Hammond asked her. "I would consider it a favor, for I've got to go back and try to catch up with my correspondence.

I expect this is worse than those you skimmed through yesterday."

Ruth did not hear him. Suddenly she had seen something that had not at first interested her. She read the first few lines of the opening, and saw nothing in them of importance. It was the writing itself that struck her.

"Why!" she suddenly gasped.

She was reminded of something that she had seen before. This writing----

"Let me go back to the camp with you, Mr. Hammond," she said, slipping into the seat and taking the packet of written sheets into her lap. "I--I will look through this scenario, if you like. There is something down there on the Point that I want."

"Sure. Be glad to have your company," he said, letting in his clutch after pushing the starter. "We're off."

Ruth did not speak again just then. With widening eyes she began to devour the first pages of the hermit's ma.n.u.script.

CHAPTER XVIII

UNCERTAINTIES

The automobile purred along the sh.e.l.l road, past the white-sided, green-blinded houses of the retired ship captains and the other well-to-do people of Herringport. The car ran so smoothly that Ruth might have read all the way.

But after the first page or two--those containing the opening scenes of "Plain Mary"--she dared not read farther.

Not yet. It was not that there was a familiar phrase in the upright chirography of the old hermit. The story merely suggested a familiar situation to Ruth's mind. Thus far it was only a suggestion.

There was something else she felt she must prove or disprove first of all.

She sat beside Mr. Hammond quite speechless until they came to the camp on the harbor sh.o.r.e of Beach Plum Point.

He went off cheerfully to his letter writing, and Ruth entered the shack she occupied with Helen and Jennie. She opened her locked writing-case.

Under the first flap she inserted her fingers and drew forth the wrinkled sc.r.a.p of paper she had picked up on the sands.

A glance at the blurred writing a.s.sured her that it was the same as that of the hermit's scenario.

"Flash:

"As in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be----"

Shakingly Ruth sat down before the cheap little maple table. She spread open the newspaper wrapper and stared again at the t.i.tle page of "Plain Mary."

That t.i.tle was nothing at all like the one she had given her lost scenario. But a t.i.tle, after all, meant very little.