The armistice had been declared.  Cheslow, like every town and city in the Union, celebrated the great occasion.  It was not merely a day’s celebration.  The war was over (or so it seemed) and the boys who were so much missed would be coming home again.  It took some time for Ruth and her friends to realize that this return must be, because of the nature of things, postponed for many tiresome months.

Before Tom Cameron was likely to be freed from the army, the matter of the Indian girl’s engagement with the moving picture corporation must be completely settled—­at least, as far as Dakota Joe’s claim upon Wonota’s services went.

CHAPTER IX

THE PLOT DEVELOPS

Ruth had insisted upon Wonota’s remaining at the Red Mill from the hour she had ridden there for protection.  Not that they believed Fenbrook would actually harm the Indian girl after he had cooled down.  But it was better that she should be in Ruth’s care as long as she was to work somewhat under the latter’s tutelage.

Besides, it gave the picture writer a chance to study her subject.  It would be too much to expect that Wonota could play a difficult part.  She had had no experience in acting.  Ruth knew that she must fit a part to Wonota, not the girl to a part.  In other words, the Indian girl was merely a type for screen exploitation, and the picture Ruth wrote must be fitted to her capabilities.

Grasping, like any talented writer does, at any straw of novelty, Ruth had seen possibilities in the little incident Aunt Alvirah had told about her ancestor who had crossed the Western plains in the early emigrant days.  She meant to open her story with a similar incident, as a prologue to the actual play.

Ruth made her heroine (the part she wished to fit to Wonota, the Osage Indian girl) repay in part the debt her family owed the white physician by saving a descendant of the physician from peril in the Indian country.  This young man, the hero, is attracted by the Indian maid who has saved his life; but he is under the influence of a New York girl, one of the tourist party, to whom he is tentatively engaged.

But the New York girl deserts the hero when he gets into difficulty in New York.  He is accused of a crime that may send him to the penitentiary for a long term and there seems no way to disprove the crime.  Word of his peril comes to the Indian maid in her Western home.  She knows and suspects the honesty of the timber men with whom the hero is connected in business.  She discovers these villains are the guilty ones, and she travels to New York to testify for him and to clear him of the charge.  The end of the story, as well as the beginning, was to be filmed in the wilds.

With the incidents of her plot gradually taking form in her mind and being jotted down on paper, Ruth’s hours began to be very full.  She was with Wonota as much as possible, and the Indian girl began to show an almost doglike devotion to the girl of the Red Mill.