“I see you’re doin’ like I asked you, ma’am,” he hoarsely whispered behind his hairy hand to the girl of the Red Mill.  “What’s the prospect?”

“I could scarcely tell you yet, Mr. Fenbrook,” Ruth said decidedly.  “Wonota must decide for herself, of course.”

“Humph!  Wal, if she knows what’s best for her she’ll aim to stay right with old Dakota Joe.  I’m her best friend.”

Ruth left the girl at this time with some encouraging words.  She had told her that if she, Wonota, could get a release from her contract with the showman there would be an opportunity for her to earn much more money, and under better conditions, in the moving picture business.

“Oh!” cried Wonota with sparkling eyes, “do you think I could act for the movies?  I have often wanted to try.”

“There it is,” said Helen, as the girls drove home.  “Even the Red Indian is crazy to act in the movies.  Can you beat it?”

“Well,” Ruth asked soberly, “who is there that is not interested in getting his or her picture taken?  Not very many.  And when it comes to appearing on the silver sheet—­well, even kings and potentates fall for that!”

Ruth was so sure that Wonota could be got into the moving pictures and that Mr. Hammond would be successful in making a star of the Indian girl, that that very night she sat up until the wee small hours laying out the plot of her picture story—­the story which she hoped to make into a really inspirational film.

There was coming, however, an unexpected obstacle to this achievement—­an obstacle which at first seemed to threaten utter failure to her own and to Mr. Hammond’s plans.

CHAPTER VII

DAKOTA JOE’S WRATH

It was a crisp day with that tang of frost in the air that makes the old shiver and the young feel a tingling in the blood.  Aunt Alvirah drew her chair closer to the stove in the sitting-room.  She had a capable housework helper now, and even Jabez Potter made no audible objection, for Ruth paid the bill, and the dear old woman had time to sit and talk to “her pretty” as she loved to do.

“Oh, my back and oh, my bones!” she murmured, as she settled into her rocking-chair.  “I am a leetle afraid, my pretty, that you will have your hands full if you write pictures for red savages to act.  It does seem to me they air dangerous folks to have anything to do with.

“Why, when I was a mite of a girl, I heard my great-grandmother tell that when she was a girl she went with her folks clean acrosst the continent—­or, leastways, beyond the Mississippi, and they drove in a big wagon drawed by oxen.”

“Goodness!  They went in an emigrant train?” cried Ruth.

“Not at all.  ’Twarn’t no train,” objected Aunt Alvirah.  “Trains warn’t heard of then.  Why, I can remember when the first railroad went through this part of the country and it cut right through Silas Bassett’s farm.  They told him he could go down to the tracks any time he felt like going to town, wave his hat, and the train would stop for him.”