It was a head of black hair upon the pillow. It might easily have been Tom Cameron. And in a moment Ruth was sure that he was an American from the very contour of his visage—but it was not Tom!
“Oh! It’s not! It’s not!” she kept saying over and over to herself. And then she suddenly found herself sitting in a chair at the end of the ward and the nurse was saying to her:
“Are you about to faint, Mademoiselle? It is the friend you look for?”
“Oh, no! I sha’n’t faint,” Ruth declared, getting a grip upon her nerves again. “It is not my friend. Oh! I cannot tell you how relieved I am.”
“Ah, yes! I know,” sighed the Frenchwoman. “I have a father and a brother in our army and after every battle I fear until I hear from them. I am glad for your sake it is another than your friend. And yet—he will have friends who suffer, too—is it not?”
CHAPTER XXI—AGAIN THE WERWOLF
Ruth Fielding felt as though she needed a cup of tea more than she ever had before in her life. And Clare Biggars had her own tea service in her room at the pension. Ruth had inquired for Clare and learned that this was a free hour for the Kansas girl. So Ruth and Henriette Dupay drove to the boarding-house; for to get a good cup of tea in one of the restaurants or cafés was impossible.
Her relief at learning the wounded American in the hospital was not Tom Cameron was quite overwhelming at first. Ruth had come out to the car so white of face that the French girl was frightened.
“Oh! Mam’zelle Fielding! It is that you haf los’ your friend?” cried the girl in the stammering English she tried so hard to make perfect.
“I don’t know that,” sighed Ruth. “But, at least, if he is wounded, he was not brought here to this hospital.”