Part 5 (2/2)
”Pooh!” exclaimed Helen carelessly. ”Work was made for slaves. And Tom had a hard time over in France. I tell dad he ought not to expect Tommy-boy to really work for a long, long time to come.”
”Do you think that is right, Helen?” admonished her chum. ”Idleness was never good for anybody.”
”It isn't as though Tom was poor. He hasn't got to toil and delve in an old office--”
”You know it isn't that,” cried Ruth warmly. ”But he should make good use of his time. And your father needs him. He ought to be idle now, not Tom.”
”Grandmother Grunt!” laughed Helen. ”You're twice as old as Aunt Alvirah right now.”
”After what we have been through--after what the world has been through for five years--we all ought to be at work,” said Ruth rather severely.
”And Tom is no exception.”
”Why, I never knew you to be hard on Tommy-boy before!” pouted Tom's sister.
”Perhaps I never had occasion to be hard on him before,” Ruth answered.
”He is only one of many. Especially many of those who were over there in France. They seem to be so unsettled and--and so careless for the future.”
”Regular female Simon Legree, you are, Ruthie Fielding.”
”But when Tom first came back he was as eager as he could be to get to business and to begin a business career. And lately, it seems to me, he's had an awful slump in his ambition. I never saw the like.”
”Oh, bother!” muttered Helen, and started the car.
The car shot ahead, and in five minutes they pa.s.sed the country inn, but saw nothing of either Wonota or the Indian chief. In a cove below the river bank, however, Ruth caught a glimpse of a small motor-boat with two men in it. And backed into a wood's path near the highway was a small motor-car.
Was it the smart roadster Mr. Horatio Bilby had driven to the Red Mill?
Ruth could not be sure. But she did not enjoy the ride with Helen and Aunt Alvirah very much for thinking of the possibility of its being Mr.
Bilby's car so close to the inn where Chief Totantora was stopping.
CHAPTER VI
AN ABDUCTION
The ride in Helen's car was enjoyable, especially for Aunt Alvirah. How that old lady did smile and (as she herself laughingly said) ”gabble” her delight! Being shut inside the house so much, the broader sight of the surrounding country and the now peacefully flowing Lumano River was indeed a treat.
Helen drove up the river and over the Long Bridge, where she halted the car for a time that they might look both up and down the stream. And it was from this point that Ruth again caught a glimpse of the motor-boat she had before spied near the roadside inn.
There was but one man in it now, and the boat was moored to the root of a big tree that overhung the little cove. Not that there was anything astonis.h.i.+ng or suspicious in the appearance of the boat. Merely, it was there and seemed to have no particular business there. And the girl of the Red Mill recalled that Mr. Horatio Bilby's motor-car was backed into the bushes near that spot.
Had Mr. Bilby, who had announced that his business in this vicinity was to obtain possession of Wonota, anything to do with the men in the boat?
The thought may have been but an idle suggestion in Ruth's mind.
Intuition was strong in Ruth Fielding, however. Somehow, the abandoned car being there near the inn where Totantora was staying and to which Wonota had gone to see her father, and the unidentified motor-boat lurking at the river's edge in the same vicinity, continued to rap an insistent warning at the door of the girl's mind.
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