“Now,” thought the girl of the Red Mill, very much puzzled, “I wonder just what and who she is? And has she been in Paris all through the war and has not yet awakened to the seriousness of the situation? Then there is something fundamentally wrong with Irma Lentz.”
She might not have given the strange woman much of her attention during the voyage, however, for Ruth did not like unpleasant people and there were so many others who were interesting, to say the least, on board the ship, if a little incident had not occurred early the next morning which both surprised Ruth and made her deeply suspicious of Irma Lentz.
The girl could not sleep very well because of pain in her shoulder and arm. Perhaps she had tried to use the arm more than she should. However, being unable to sleep, she rose at dawn and rang for the night stewardess. She had already won this woman’s interest, and she helped Ruth dress. The girl left her stateroom and went on deck, which was free to the passengers now.
As she passed through a narrow way behind the forward deck-house on the main deck, she heard a sudden explosion of voices—a sharp, high voice and one deeper and more guttural. But the point that held Ruth Fielding’s attention so quickly was that the language used was German! There was no doubting that fact.
There certainly should be nobody using that language on this British ship carrying Americans to the United States! That was Ruth’s first thought.
She walked quietly to the corner of the house and peered around it. The morning was still misty and there were few persons on deck save the gangs of cleaners. Backed against a backstay, and facing the point where the girl of the Red Mill stood, was Irma Lentz, in mackintosh and veil.
The strange woman was talking angrily with a barefooted sailor in working clothes. He was bareheaded as well as barefooted, and his coarse shirt was open at the throat displaying a hairy chest. He possessed a mop of flaxen hair, and his countenance was too Teutonic of cast to be mistaken.
Besides, like the woman, he was speaking German in a most excited and angry fashion.
CHAPTER IX—QUEER FOLKS
In school Ruth Fielding and her classmates had taken German just as they had French. Jennie Stone often said she had forgotten the former language just as fast as she could and had felt much better after it was out of her system.