She saw, too, that Tom pulled something from his pocket hastily and thrust it into Parloe's hand. The old man chuckled slily, said something else to the boy, and then turned away and climbed into his wagon again. He drove away as Ruth ran down the path to the waiting auto.

"Hullo, Tom!" she cried. "I told you I wouldn't keep you waiting long."

"How-do, Ruth," he returned; but it must be confessed that he was not as bright and smiling as usual, and he looked away from Ruth and after Parloe the next moment.

As the girl reached the machine Uncle Jabez came to the mill door again. He observed Ruth about to get in and he came down the steps and strode toward the Cameron automobile. Jasper Parloe had clucked to his old nag and was now rattling away from the place.

"Where are you going, Ruth?" the miller demanded, sternly eyeing Tom Cameron, and without returning the lad's polite greeting.

"She is going up to our house to lunch with my sister, Mr. Potter,"

Tom hastened to say before Ruth could reply.

"She will do nothing of the kind," said Uncle Jabez, shortly. "Ruth, go back to the house and help your Aunt Alvirah. You are going about too much and leaving your aunt to do everything."

This was not so, and Ruth knew very well that her uncle knew it was not so. She flushed and hesitated, and he said:

"Do you hear me? I expect to be obeyed if you remain here at the Red Mill. Just because I lay few commands upon you, is no reason why you should consider it the part of wisdom to be disobedient when I do give an order."

"Oh, Uncle! do let me go," begged Ruth, fairly crying. "Helen has been so kind to me--and Aunt Alvirah did not suppose you would object.

They come here--"

"But I do not propose that they shall come here any more," declared Uncle Jabez, in the same stern tone. "You can drive on, young man. The less I see of any of you Camerons the better I shall like it."

"But, Mr. Potter--" began Tom.

The old man raised his hand and stopped him.

"I won't hear any talk about it. I know just how much these Camerons have done for you," he said to Ruth. "They've done enough--altogether too much. We will stop this intimacy right here and now. At least, you will not go to their house, Ruth. Do as I tell you--go in to your Aunt Alviry."

Then, as the weeping girl turned away, she heard him say, even more harshly than he had spoken to her: "I don't want anything to do with people who are hand and glove with that Jasper Parloe. He's a thief-- a bigger thief, perhaps, than people generally know. At least, he's cost me enough. Now, you drive on and don't let me see you or your sister about here again."

He turned on his heel and went back to the mill without giving Tom time to say a word. The boy, angry enough, it was evident from his expression of countenance, hesitated several minutes after the miller was gone. Once he arose, as though he would get out of the car and follow Jabez into the mill. But finally he started the engine, turned the car, and drove slowly away.

This was a dreadful day indeed for the girl of the Red Mill. Never in her life had she been so hurt--never had she felt herself so ill-used since coming to this place to live. Uncle Jabez had never been really kind to her; but aside from the matter of the loss of her trunk he had never before been actually cruel.

He could have selected no way that would have hurt her more keenly. To refuse to let her go to see the girl she loved--her only close friend and playmate! And to refuse to allow Helen and Tom to come here to see her! This intimacy was all (and Ruth admitted it now, in a torrent of tears, as she lay upon her little bed) that made life at the Red Mill endurable. Had she not met Helen and found her such a dear girl and so kind a companion, Ruth told herself now that she never could have borne the dull existence of this house.

She heard Aunt Alvirah's halting step upon the stair and before the old woman reached the top of the flight, Ruth plainly heard her moaning to herself: "Oh, my back! and oh, my bones!" Thus groaning and halting, Aunt Alvirah came to Ruth's door and pushed it open.

"Oh, deary, deary, me!" she whispered, limping into the room.

"Don't-ee cry no more, poor lamb. Old Aunt Alviry knows jest how it hurts--she wishes she could bear it for ye! Now, now, my pretty creetur--don't-ee take on so. Things will turn out all right yet.

Don't lose hope."

She had reached the bed ere this and had gathered the sobbing girl into her arms. She sat upon the side of the bed and rocked Ruth to and fro, with her arms about her. She did not say much more, but her unspoken sympathy was wonderfully comforting.

Aunt Alvirah did not criticise Uncle Jabez's course. She never did.

But she gave Ruth in her sorrow all the sympathy of which her great nature was capable. She seemed to understand just how the girl felt, without a spoken word on her part. She did not seek to explain the miller's reason for acting as he did. Perhaps she had less idea than had Ruth why Jabez Potter should have taken such a violent dislike to the Camerons.

For Ruth half believed that she held the key to that mystery. When she came to think it over afterward she put what she had heard between the two old men--Jabez and Parloe--down at the brook, with what had occurred at the mill just before Tom Cameron had come in sight; and putting these two incidents together and remembering that Jasper Parloe had overheard Tom in his delirium accuse the miller of being the cause of his injury, Ruth was pretty sure that in that combination of circ.u.mstances was the true explanation of Uncle Jabez's cruel decision.

Ruth was not the girl to lie on her bed and weep for long. She was sensible enough to know very well that such a display of disappointment and sorrow would not better the circ.u.mstances. While she remained at the Red Mill she must obey Uncle Jabez, and his decisions could not be controverted. She had never won a place near enough to the miller's real nature to coax him, or to reason with him regarding this gruff decision he had made. She had to make up her mind that, unless something unexpected happened to change Uncle Jabez, she was cut off from much future a.s.sociation with her dear chum, Helen Cameron.

She got up in a little while, bathed her face and eyes, and kissed Aunt Alvirah warmly.

"You are a dear!" she declared, hugging the little old woman. "Come! I won't cry any more. I'll come down stairs with you, Auntie, and help get dinner."

But Ruth could eat none herself. She did not feel as though she could even sit at the table with Uncle Jabez that noon, and remained outside while the miller ate. He never remarked upon her absence, or paid her the least attention. Oh, how heartily Ruth wished now that she had never come away from Darrowtown and had never seen the Red Mill.

The next Monday morning the rural mail carrier brought her a long letter from Helen. Uncle Jabez had not said anything against a correspondence; indeed, Ruth did not consider that he had more than refused to have the Camerons come to see her or she to return their visits. If she met them on the road, or away from the house, she did not consider that it would be disobeying Uncle Jabez to a.s.sociate with Helen and Tom.

This letter from Helen was very bitter against the miller and wildly proposed that Ruth should run away from the Red Mill and come to Overlook to live. She declared that her papa would not object-- indeed, that everybody would warmly welcome the appearance of Ruth Fielding "even if she came like a tramp "; and that Tom would linger about the Red Mill for an hour or two every evening so that Ruth could slip out and communicate with her friends, or could be helped away if she wanted to leave without the miller's permission.

But Ruth, coming now to consider her situation more dispa.s.sionately, simply wrote a loving letter in reply to Helen's, entrusting it to the post, and went on upon her usual way, helping Aunt Alviry, going to school, and studying harder than ever. She missed Helen's companionship vastly; she often wet her pillow with tears at night (and that was not like Ruth) and felt very miserable indeed at times.

But school and its routine took up a deal of the girl's thought. Her studies confined her more and more as the end of the term approached.

And in addition to the extra work a.s.signed the girl at the Red Mill by Miss Cramp, there was a special study which Ruth wished to excel in.

Miss Cramp was old-fashioned enough to believe that spelling was the very best training for the mind and the memory and that it was a positive crime for any child to grow up to be a slovenly speller. Four times a year Miss Cramp held an old-fashioned "spelling-bee" at the schoolhouse, on designated Friday evenings; and now came the last of the four for this school year.

Ruth had never been an extra good speller, but because her kind teacher was so insistent upon the point, the girl from the Red Mill put forth special efforts to please Miss Cramp in this particular. She had given much spare time to the study of the spelling book, and particularly did she devote herself to that study now that she hadn't her chum to a.s.sociate with.

The spelling-bees were attended by the parents of the pupils and all the neighbors thereabout, and Helen wrote that she and Tom were going to attend on the evening in question and that Tom said he hoped to see Ruth "just eat up those other girls" when it came to spelling. But Ruth Fielding much doubted her cannibalistic ability in this line.

Julia Semple had borne off the honors on two occasions during the winter, and her particular friend Rosa Ball, had won the odd trial.

Now it was generally considered that the final spelling-bee would be the occasion of a personal trial of strength between the two friendly rivals. Either Julia or Rosa must win.

But Ruth was the kind of a person who, in attempting a thing, did her very best to accomplish it. She had given some time and thought to the spelling book. She was not likely to "go down" before any easy, or well-known word. Indeed, she believed herself letter perfect in the very hardest page of the spelling-book some time before the fateful evening.

"Oh, perhaps you think you know them all, Ruth Fielding!" exclaimed one of the little girls one day when the spelling-bee was being discussed at recess. "But Miss Cramp doesn't stick to the speller. You just wait till she tackles the dictionary."

"The dictionary!" cried Ruth.

"That's what Miss Cramp does," the child a.s.sured her. "If she can't spell them down out of the speller, she begins at the beginning of the dictionary and gives words out until she finds one that floors them all. You wait and see!"

So Ruth thought it would do no harm to study the dictionary a little, and taking her cue from what the little girls said, she remained in between sessions and began with "aperse," committing to memory as well as she could those words that looked to be "puzzlers." Before the day of the spelling-bee she believed that, if Miss Cramp didn't go beyond the first letter of the alphabet, she would be fairly well grounded in the words as they came in rotation.

Ruth knew that every other pupil in the school would have friends in the audience that evening save herself. She wished that Aunt Alvirah could have attended the spelling-bee; but of course her back and her bones precluded her walking so far, and neither of them dared ask Uncle Jabez to hitch up and take them to the schoolhouse in his wagon.

The schoolhouse was crowded, all the extra seats that could be provided were arranged in rows, and, it being a mild evening, the men and bigger boys stood outside the open windows. There was a great bustle and whispering until Miss Cramp's tinkling bell called the audience as well as the pupils to order.

The scholars took their places according to their cla.s.s standing in a long row around the room. As one was spelled down he or she took a seat again, and so the cla.s.s was rapidly thinned out, for many of the little folk missed on the very easiest words in the speller. Ruth stood within ten pupils of the head of the line at the beginning and when the spelling began she had an encouraging smile and nod from Helen, who, with her brother, sat where they could see the girl from the Red Mill Ruth determined to do her best.

CHAPTER XIX

THE STING OF POVERTY

At first Miss Cramp's "giving out" of the words was like repeated volleys of small-arms in this orthographical battle. Every pupil well knew the pages of two-syllable words beginning, "baker, maker, poker, broker, quaker, shaker" and even the boys rattled these off, grinning the while in a most sheepish fashion at their elder brothers or their women-folk, who beamed in pride upon them until such lists as "food, soup, meat, bread, dough, b.u.t.ter" bowled over the more shaky ones.

The first failures (and usually upon comparatively easy words) were greeted with some laughter, and the ridiculed spellers sought their seats with hanging heads. By and by, however, the failures were not all at the bottom of the cla.s.s; here and there such lists as "inane, profane, humane, insane, mundane, urbane," or, "staid, unlaid, mermaid, prayed, weighed, portrayed" began to pick out uncertain ones the entire length of the line.