“Ma foi!” exclaimed the old man. “It forecasts another bombardment or air attack. Ah-h! La-la!”
He sighed, nodded to Ruth, and stepped back to let the car go on. The girl felt as though she were growing superstitious herself. This surely was a new and strange world she had come to—and a new and strange experience.
“Do you really believe all that?” she finally asked Charlie Bragg, point-blank.
“I tell you I don’t know what I believe,” he said. “But you saw the werwolf as well as I. Now, didn’t you?”
“I saw a light-colored dog of large size that ran across the track we were following,” said Ruth Fielding decisively, almost fiercely. “I’ll confess to nothing else.”
But she liked Charlie Bragg just the same, and thanked him warmly when he set her down at the door of the Clair Hospital just before midnight. He was going on to the ambulance station, several miles nearer to the actual front.
There were no street lights in Clair and the windows of the hospital were all shrouded, as well as those of the dwellings left standing in the town. Airplanes of the enemy had taken to bombing hospitals in the work of “frightfulness.”
Ruth was welcomed by a kindly Frenchwoman, who was matron, or directrice, and shown to a cell where she could sleep. Her duties began the next morning, and it was not long before the girl of the Red Mill was deeply engaged in this new work—so deeply engaged, indeed, that she almost forgot her suspicions about the woman in black, and Legrand and José, or whatever their real names were.
However, Charlie Bragg’s story of the werwolf, of the suspected countess in her chateau behind Clair, and Gaston’s prophecy regarding the meaning of the ghostly appearance, were not easily forgotten. Especially, when, two nights following Ruth’s coming to the hospital, a German airman dropped several bombs near the institution. Evidently he was trying to get the range of the Red Cross hospital.