“Hard luck for Stillinger and his passenger, sure enough. The American airplane was seen to fall, and, although a searching party discovered the wrecked machine, neither its pilot nor the passenger was found.”
Charlie Bragg had no idea when he wrote this that he was causing Ruth Fielding, homeward bound, heartache and anxiety. She dared tell Helen nothing about this, although she read the letter before the Admiral Pekhard drew away from the pier and Helen and Jennie went ashore.
Of course, Stillinger’s passenger might not have been Tom Cameron. Yet Tom had been going to the aviation field expecting to fly with the American ace. And the fact that Tom had allowed her, Ruth, to sail without a word of remembrance almost convinced the girl of the Red Mill that something untoward had happened to him.
It was a secret which she felt she could share with nobody. She set sail upon the venturesome voyage to America with this added weight of sorrow on her heart.
CHAPTER VI—A NEW EXPERIENCE
Tom landed from a slowly crawling military train at a place some miles behind the actual battleline and far west of the sector in which his division had been fighting for a month. This division was in a great rest camp; but Tom did not want rest. He craved excitement—something new.
In a few hours an automobile which he shared with a free-lance newspaper man brought him to a town which had been already bombarded half a dozen times since Von Kluck’s forced retreat after the first advance on Paris.
As Tom walked out to the aviation field, where Ralph Stillinger’s letter had advised his friend he was to be found, all along the streets the American captain saw posters announcing Cave Voûteé with the number of persons to be accommodated in these places of refuge, such number ranging from fifteen to sixty.
The bomb-proof cellars were protected by sandbags and were conveniently located so that people might easily find shelter whenever the German Fokkers or Tauben appeared. Naturally, as the town was so near the aviation field, it was bound to be a mark for the Hun bombing planes.