Ruth of the U. S. A.

by Edwin Balmer

Ruth delayed only the instant necessary to make certain that he had gone upstairs. Suspicion which now turned upon Dittman and upon the Russians swiftly must approach her; moreover, the hour of arrival of Oberst-Lieutenant von Fallenbosch was almost here. By her stroke of boldness and of luck she had succeeded in temporarily overreaching the secretary whom she had found so unbalanced by the death of his superior. But she could not possibly hope to dupe von Fallenbosch. She must fail with him as miserably as she had failed with von Forstner. And to attempt with him and to fail involved, now, not only her own destruction but delivery into German hands of that most essential information which she had intercepted, and loss to the allies of the knowledge of German plans.

She opened the drawer which Adler had just closed and she took out the sheets of von Forstner’s reports and the stencils. She went out into the hall and, finding it empty, she passed quickly to a door on the side of the house which, she believed, was not commanded from the windows of the room where Captain von Forstner’s body lay. In that direction, also, the forest lay nearer to the house; Ruth went out and walked toward the trees. An impulse to run almost controlled her, but she realized that she must be in sight of servants, who might not question her strolling out away from the house in the warm spring sunshine but who would immediately report anything which resembled flight. So she went slowly until she reached the forest; then she ran—wildly and breathlessly.

She found a path, well marked and much used and easy to run upon. Other paths, almost overgrown, opened into it here and there. Ruth ran by the first few of these; then, choosing arbitrarily, she took one of the disused ways which twisted north—she noticed—through denser thickets of budding oaks and beeches; it ascended, too, bending back and forth up a mountainside which brought the darker boughs of the black firs drooping about her while, underfoot, the ground alternately became stony bare and soft with velvety cushions of pine needles.

She stopped at last, exhausted and gasping; her pulses were pounding so in her head that she scarcely could hear, and the forest on every side limited sight. But so far as she could see and as well as she could hear there was no alarm of anyone following her. It seemed absolutely still on the mountainside except for the movement of the noon breeze in the tree tops; now from somewhere far away and off to the right she heard the ring of an ax and, after a minute, the fall of a tree; now the sound of the ax again.

CHAPTER XIX
THE UNDERGROUND RAILWAY

Ruth sank down upon the ground in a warm, sunny spot where the trees were more scant than they had been below. They were dense enough, however, to shield her from sight of anyone in the valley, while they permitted a view down the mountainside. Off to the west she could see a stretch of railroad; nearer she got a glimpse of a highway; she saw horsemen and several slower specks, which must be men on foot. Oberst-Lieutenant von Fallenbosch had arrived, Ruth believed, and Adler had started the pursuit after her. But as she thought of the maze of pathways through the forest she believed that she was safe for a while—unless a large number of the prisoners joined in the search and if Adler did not use dogs to track her.

But she could not make herself safer by farther aimless flight. Here seemed to be as secure a spot as she might find for the examination of the documents which she had procured; here was the place to plan. She laid out upon a rock the pages of von Forstner’s report, and, placing the stencils, she studied them in series of three, as she had seen Adler do. These pages—those which Adler had read, together with those which she had kept concealed—told a plain, certain story. The Germans at the present moment were concerning themselves with the minutest details of events before the Reims-Soissons line of the allies; other sectors, in comparison, were disregarded; before Reims and Soissons the enemy were maturing their great attack!

Ruth, having read, gathered together the pages and sat in the sun gazing away over the Rhine to the west. The feeling of fate—the touch of destiny—which had exalted and transformed her upon that cold January morning in Chicago quickened her again. Something beyond herself originally had sent her into this tremendous adventure, throughout which she had followed instinct—chance—fate—whatever you called it—rather than any conscious scheme. At the outset she had responded simply to impulse to serve; to get into Germany—how, she did not know; to do there—what, she had not known. At different times she had formed plans, of course, many plans; but as she thought back upon them now they seemed to her to have contemplated only details, as though she had recognized her incapacity, by conscious plan, to attain this consummation.

For she realized that this was consummation. This which she already had gained, and gained through acts and chances which she could not have foreseen, was all—indeed, more than all—she could have hoped to obtain through the vague, delayed ordeals which her fancy had formed for her. She had nothing more to attempt here in the enemy’s land than escape and return to the allied lines; she had no right, indeed, to attempt more; for anything additional which she could gain would be of such slight value, in comparison with what she now had, that it could not justify her in heaping hazard upon the risks which she must run in returning to the allied armies with the knowledge she possessed.

There was Gerry Hull, of course. He was in this land of the enemy somewhere—alive or dead. When she was entering Germany she had thought of herself as coming, somehow, to find and to aid him. But what she had gained meant that now she must abandon him.