Ruth could see dull eyes in a big, stupid face. The man said something with the inflection of a question. She could not make out the words, but obviously he was asking if anyone was alive under the car. So Ruth answered. The face disappeared; and she heard consultation. Soon several men tramped in the water and thrust timbers under the side of the car and tilted it. Large, rough hands reached under and caught Ruth and pulled her out.
She sank limp when the hands released her, gently enough, and laid her upon the sloping bank above the stream. The man who had rescued her had four companions, all of them Russians. They engaged themselves immediately in dragging out Captain von Forstner and then exploring under the car. But they found no one else. Ruth discovered the driver lying a rod or so beyond her and farther up the slope. Plainly he had been thrown out and the car had crushed him. The Russians had seen him before they had come to the car, and when Ruth made signs to them to go to the man they shook their heads, repeating a sentence which meant—she had no doubt—that the man was dead. They repeated the same words about von Forstner.
Ruth struggled up, dizzily, to find herself battered and with muscles bruised and strained; but she had escaped without broken bones or disabling injury. A German soldier, armed with a rifle, joined the group of Russians about Ruth. Evidently he was a guard who had been at some distance when the car went from the road.
“You are much injured, gnädiges Fräulein?” the soldier asked her solicitously and respectfully.
“Only a little,” Ruth replied, collecting strength again and regaining clearness of thought.
When the Russians first had come to her aid she had thought of them as helping her, as an American against the Germans; but now she was cool enough to realize how absurd that idea was. These peasant slaves were not moved by any political emotions and, if they had been, they were incapable of recognizing her as an American and the possessor of any particular sympathy for them. She was to them a lady—a companion of a master who undoubtedly had mistreated them; but when they had found that master helpless they had been below any instincts of revenge upon him. They had considered his misfortune a lucky chance given them to perform some service which could win them favor, and now that the master was dead they sought that favor from the mistress.
And much the same considerations governed the German guard. It was plain from his manner of address to her that he could not have witnessed the accident to the car, or at least he could not have observed that she had caused it. She was to him a friend of Hauptmann von Forstner, who had passed riding beside Herr Hauptmann—a lady, of the class of persons with whom Herr Hauptmann associated and whose authority at all times and in all matters the private soldier was accustomed to accept.
The authority which Ruth thus possessed was extremely local, of course; its realms might not run beyond the little leafy valley of the brook, and it surely was temporary; but locally and for the instant it was hers.
“You desire, gnädiges Fräulein,” the soldier asked her, “that I stay here and send one of them,” he indicated the Russians, “with word to the manor or that I go?”
“You go,” Ruth directed, struggling up to her feet. “I am quite strong again and you can do nothing for Herr Hauptmann.”