“Who wants to shake it?” demanded Helen.  “Maybe she is right, at that!”

The thing about Wonota that “gave the fidgets” to Jennie and Helen was the fact that she could sit for mile after mile, while the train rocked over the rails, beading moccasins and other wearing apparel, and with scarcely a glance out of the car window.  Towns, villages, rivers, plains, woods and hills, swept by in green and brown panorama, and seemed to interest Wonota not at all.  It was only when the train, after they changed at Denver, began to climb into the Rockies that the Indian maid grew interested.

The Osage Indians had always been a plains’ tribe.  The rugged and white-capped heights interested Wonota because they were strange to her.  Here, too, were primeval forests visible from the windows of the car.  Hemlock and spruce in black masses clothed the mountainsides, while bare-limbed groves of other wood filled the valleys and the sweeps of the hills.

Years before Ruth and her two chums had been through this country in going to “Silver Ranch,” but the charm of its mysterious gorges, its tottering cliffs, its deep canyons where the dashing waters flowed, and the generally rugged aspect of all nature, did not fail now to awe them.  Wonota was not alone in gazing, enthralled, at the landscape which was here revealed.

Two days of this journey amid the mountains, and the train slowed down at Clearwater, where the special car was sidetracked.  Although the station was some distance from the “location” Mr. Hammond’s representative had selected for the taking of the outdoor pictures, the company was to use the car as its headquarters.  There were several automobiles and a herd of riding ponies at hand for the use of the company.  Here, too, Mr. Hammond and his companions were met by the remainder of the performers selected to play parts in “Brighteyes.”

There were about twenty riders—­cowpunchers and the like; “stunt riders,” for the most part.  In addition there were more than a score of Indians—­some pure blood like Wonota, but many of them halfbreeds, and all used to the moving picture work, down to the very toddlers clinging to their mothers’ blankets.  The Osage princess was inclined to look scornfully at this hybrid crew at first.  Finally, however, she found them to be very decent sort of folk, although none of them were of her tribe.

Ruth and Helen and Jennie met several riders who had worked for Mr. Hammond when he had made Ruth’s former Western picture which is described in “Ruth Fielding in the Saddle,” and the gallant Westerners were ready to devote themselves to the entertainment of the girls from the East.

There was only one day of planning and making ready for the picture, in which Helen and Jennie could be “beaued” about by the cow-punchers.  Ruth was engaged with Mr. Hammond, Jim Hooley, and the camera man and their assistants.  Everyone was called for work on the ensuing morning and the automobiles and the cavalcade of pony-riders started for the Hubbell Ranch.