“Not much about anything celestial, I guarantee,” said Ruth, slyly.  “Oh! there those folks go again.”

“Goodness me!” gasped Helen.  “Where are these wonderful persons?  Oh!  I see them now.”

“Whom do you suppose they are chasing?” demanded Tom Cameron.  “Or, who is chasing them?”

“That’s it, Tommy,” scoffed his sister.  “I understand you have taken up navigation with the other branches of higher mathematics at Seven Oaks; and now you want to trouble Ruth and me with conundrums.

“Are we soothsayers, that we should be able to explain, off-hand,” pursued Helen, “the actions of such a crazy crowd of people as those——­Do look there! that woman jumped right down that sandbank.  Did you ever?”

“And there goes another!” Ruth exclaimed.

“Likewise a third,” came from Tom, who was quite as much puzzled as were the girls.

“One after the other—­just like Brown’s cows,” giggled Helen.  “Isn’t that funny?”

“It’s like one of those chases in the moving pictures,” suggested Tom.

“Why, of course!” Ruth cried, relieved at once.  “That’s exactly what it is,” and she scrambled down the bank with the pail of barberries.

“What is what?” asked her chum.

“Moving pictures,” Ruth said confidently.  “That is, it will be a film in time.  They are making a picture over yonder.  I can see the camera-man off at one side, turning the crank.”

“Cracky!” exclaimed Tom, grinning, “I thought that was a fellow with a hand-organ, and I was looking for the monkey.”

“Monkey, yourself,” cried his sister, gaily.

“Didn’t know but that he was playing for those ’crazy creeters’—­as your Aunt Alvirah would call them, Ruthie—­to dance by,” went on Tom.  “Come on!  I’ve got this thing fixed up so it will hobble along a little farther.  Let’s take the lane there and go down by the river road, and see what it’s all about.”

“Good idea, Tommy-boy,” agreed Ruth, as she got into the tonneau and sat down beside Helen.

“Fancy! taking moving pictures out in the open in mid-winter,” Helen remarked.  “Although this is a warm day.”

“And no snow on the ground,” chimed in Ruth.  “Uncle Jabez was saying last evening that he doesn’t remember another such open winter along the Lumano.”

“Say, Ruthie, how does your Uncle Jabez treat you, now that you are a bloated capitalist?” asked Helen, pinching her chum’s arm.

“Oh, Helen! don’t,” objected Ruth.  “I don’t feel puffed up at all—­only vastly satisfied and content.”

“Hear her! who wouldn’t?” demanded Tom.  “Five thousand dollars in bank—­and all you did was to use your wits to get it.  We had just as good a chance as you did to discover that necklace and cause the arrest of the old Gypsy,” and the young fellow laughed, his black eyes twinkling.

“I never shall feel as though the reward should all have been mine,” Ruth said, as Tom prepared to start the car.