rs! My scenario! The best thing I ever did, Tom!"

He had almost caught up to her when she reached the little pavilion. The
wind from across the river was tearing through the summer-house at a
sixty-mile-an-hour speed.

"Oh! It's gone!" Ruth cried, and had Tom not caught her she would have
dropped to the ground.

There was not a scrap of paper left upon the table, nor anywhere in
the place. Even the two fat notebooks had disappeared, and, too, the
gold-mounted pen the girl of the Red Mill had been using. All, all seemed
to have been swept out of the summer-house.

CHAPTER II

THE MYSTERY OF IT

For half a minute Tom Cameron did not know just what to do for Ruth. Then
the water spilled out of the angry clouds overhead and bade fair to drench
them.

He half carried Ruth into the summer-house and let her rest upon a bench,
sitting beside her with his arm tenderly supporting her shoulders. Ruth
had begun to sob tempestuously.

Ruth Fielding weeping! She might have cried many times in the past, but
almost always in secret. Tom, who knew her so well, had seen her in
dangerous and fear-compelling situations, and she had not wept.

"What is it?" he demanded. "What have you lost?"

"My scenario! All my work gone!"

"The new story? My goodness, Ruth, it couldn't have blown away!"

"But it has!" she wailed. "Not a scrap of it left. My notebooks--my pen!
Why!" and she suddenly controlled her sobs, for she was, after all, an
eminently practical girl. "Could that fountain pen have been carried away
by the windstorm, too?"

"There goes a barrel through the air," shouted Tom. "That's heavier than a
fountain pen. Say, this is some wind!"

The sound of the dashing rain now almost drowned their voices. It sprayed
them through the porous shelter of the vines and latticework so that they
could not sit on the bench.

Ruth huddled upon the table with Tom Cameron standing between her and the
drifting mist of the storm. She looked across the rain-drenched yard to
the low-roofed house. She had first seen it with a home-hungry heart when
a little girl and an orphan.

How many, many strange experiences she had had since that time, which
seemed so long ago! Nor had she then dreamed, as "Ruth Fielding of the Red
Mill," as the first volume of this series is called, that she would lead
the eventful life she had since that hour.

Under the niggard care of miserly old Jabez Potter, the miller, her great
uncle, tempered by t