She gazed toward the railroad and to the white streak of the road to Lauengratz, upon which, after a few minutes, a motor again passed; more horsemen appeared and more specks of walking men. But through the woods was silence; the axmen, whom she had heard before, began to fell other trees; and the steadiness of the sound brought Ruth reassurance. Whatever search was being made below had not yet disturbed the woodsmen near her. Yet she arose and crept a few hundred yards farther up the mountainside, and under heavier cover, before she dropped to the ground again.
She found herself more relaxed as the rowels of peril, which had goaded her mercilessly, ceased to incite fresh strength for farther flight. All her nerves and senses remained alert; but her body was exhausted and sore. She was hungry, too; and though nothing was farther from her thought than sleep, nevertheless she suffered the result not only of the strains of the morning, but also of her sleeplessness during the night. She was cold, having changed from her suit to a linen street dress which had been Cynthia Gail’s, and she was without a hat; so she sought the sun once more and sat back to a tree and rested.
If recaptured—she thought of herself as having been captured by von Forstner—she recognized that she would be shot. Therefore her recapture with von Forstner’s reports upon her could not make her fate worse; and in any case she determined to preserve them as proof to the French—if she ever regained access to the French—that the information which she bore was authentic. She did up the papers and the stencils together and secreted them under her clothing.
She tried to imagine what Adler and Oberst-Lieutenant von Fallenbosch—who undoubtedly was now saying to Adler a good deal more than the secretary had dreaded—would expect her to do so that she could choose the opposite course. The alternatives, obviously, were effort to reach the Swiss frontier and in some way elude the border guards or to make for the Alsace front, where the French and the Americans were fighting.
This second allured her powerfully; but, to attempt it, meant leaving this friendly cover of the Black Forest—which would hide her almost to the Swiss frontier—and crossing west to the Rhine and across to the Rhine Canal, and almost the whole way across Alsace to the Vosges Mountains, where the opposing trenches twisted. She knew that behind the German fighting front she would encounter a military zone of many miles, much more difficult to penetrate than the civilian zone bounding the soldier-sentineled barriers at the Swiss frontier. But, just beyond that zone in Alsace lay American battalions; above it would be flying American battleplanes.
Ruth closed her eyes and seemed to see them; one was fighting as she had seen Gerry Hull fight that morning near Mirevaux. It was he and he was being shot down!
She started up, blinking in the sunlight. He had been shot down again, in truth. This was Germany; and he was in Germany; the enemy had him—von Forstner’s boasting voice was saying it—dead or a prisoner. She shuddered and closed her eyes to see, again, Gerry Hull’s face. She seemed to be looking up at him; he was in blue-gray—his French uniform. Palms and roses were behind him. They were in Mrs. Corliss’ conservatory together, their first time alone.
“You’re not like anyone else here,” he was saying to her. “That’s why I needed to see you again.... What is it, Cynthia Gail?” A queer, warm little thrill went through her; she seemed to be still looking up at him, his arms were about her now; he was carrying her. They were upon the Ribot and she was telling him that she would have gone into the sea to get anyone—anyone at all. Now, “Ruth—Ruth Alden!” he was saying. Her own name; and he liked to repeat it. “They shan’t!” he was holding her so fiercely. “They shan’t!” Now he kissed her hand. Her fingers of her other hand closed gently over the hand he had kissed; so, in the sunlight at the base of a tree high upon the mountainside above Lauengratz in the Black Forest of Baden, at last she fell asleep.
Not soundly nor for extended periods; a score of times she stirred and started up at sounds made by the breeze or at the passage of some small forest animal. Once a human footfall aroused her; and she was amazed to learn how delicate her hearing had been made by alarm when she discovered how distant the man was. He bore an ax; and evidently he was a Russian or perhaps a French captive; he passed upon a path far below without even looking up to where she hid in the trees. Nevertheless Ruth fled farther about the mountain before she dared rest again.
At nightfall she was awake and during the first hours of blackness she forced her way on in spite of the dismaying difficulties of wood travel in the dark. She fell repeatedly, even when she ventured upon a path, or she bruised herself upon boughs and stumbled into thickets. But she did not give up until the conviction came to her that she was hopelessly lost.