Not having seen or heard from Henriette Dupay since her return, early in the following week Ruth started out to walk briskly to the Dupay farm one afternoon.
Of late the aeroplanes had become very numerous over this sector. They were, for the most part, American machines. But this afternoon she chanced to see one of the French Nieuports at close quarters.
These are the scouting, or battle planes, and carry but two men and a machine gun. She heard the motor some moments before seeing the aeroplane rise over the tree tops. She knew it must have leaped from a large field on this side of the Dupay farm and not far below the gateway of the Chateau Marchand.
Ruth stopped to gaze upward at the soaring airplane. Her figure stood out plainly in the country road and the two men aboard the Nieuport must have immediately spied her.
The machine dipped and scaled downward until she could have thrown a stone upward and hit it. One of the men—masked and helmeted as the flying men always are—leaned from his seat, and she saw him looking down upon her through the tangle of stay-wires.
Then he dropped a small white object that fell like a plummet at her feet!
"What in the world can that be?" murmured the girl to herself.
For a breath she was frightened. Although the aeroplane carried the French insignia it might be an enemy machine. She, too, was obsessed with the fear of spies!
But the object that fell was not an explosive bomb. It was a weighted ball of oiled silk. As the machine soared again and rapidly rose to the upper air levels, the girl picked up the strange object and burst it open.
The lead pellets that weighted the globe were scattered on the ground. Within there was nothing else but a strip of heavy document paper. On this was traced in a handwriting she knew well, this unsigned message: