“Oh, that silly girl!” shouted Mr. Grimes, the director.  “There! she’s spoiled the scene again.  I don’t know what Hammond was thinking of to send her up here to work with us.

“Hey, one of you fellows! go and fish her out.  And that spoils our chance of getting the picture to-day.  Miss Gray will have to be mollycoddled, and grandmothered, and what-not.  Huh!”

While he scolded, the director scarcely gave a glance to the struggling girl.  The latter had struck out pluckily for the shore when she came up from her involuntary plunge.  After the cry she had uttered as she fell, she had not made a sound.

To swim with one’s clothing all on is not an easy matter at the best of times.  To do this in mid-winter, when the water is icy, is well nigh an impossibility.

Several of the men of the company, more humane than the director, had sprung to assist the unfortunate girl; but suddenly the current caught her and she was swerved from the bank.  She was out of reach.

“And not a skiff in sight!” exclaimed Tom.

“Oh, dear!  The poor thing!” cried his sister.  “She’s being carried right down the river.  They’ll never get her.”

“Oh, Tom!” implored Ruth.  “Hurry and start. We must get that girl!”

“Sure we will!” cried Tom Cameron.

He was already out of the car and madly turning the crank.  In a moment the engine was throbbing.  Tom leaped back behind the wheel and the automobile darted ahead.

The rough road led directly along the verge of the river bank.  The picture-play actors scattered as he bore down upon them.  It gave Tom, as well as the girls, considerable satisfaction to see the director, Grimes, jump out of the way of the rapidly moving car.

The friends in the car saw the actress, whom Grimes had called both “Hazel” and “Miss Gray,” swirled far out from the shore; but they knew the current or an eddy would bring her back.  She sank once; but she came up again and fought the current like the plucky girl she was.

“Oh, Helen! she’s wonderful!” gasped Ruth, with clasped hands, as she watched this fight for life which was more thrilling than anything she had ever seen reproduced on the screen.

Helen was too frightened to reply; but Ruth Fielding often before had shown remarkable courage and self-possession in times of emergency.  No more than the excited Tom did she lose her head on this occasion.

As has been previously told, Ruth had come to the banks of the Lumano River and to her Uncle Jabez Potter’s Red Mill some years before, when she was a small girl.  She was an orphan, and the crabbed and miserly miller was her single living relative.

The first volume of the series, entitled “Ruth Fielding of the Red Mill,” tells of the incidents which follow Ruth’s coming to reside with her uncle, and with Aunt Alvirah Boggs, who was “everybody’s aunt” but nobody’s relative.