She had become a passenger, she found, upon one of the “underground railways” in operation to conduct escaped prisoners across the frontiers; Fayal, having brought her safely over his section, said his adieu.
“The next German attack is to come upon the French on the front between Reims and Soissons, remember, Fayal,” Ruth enjoined upon the man when parting with him. “If I fail to get through, you must try to send the word.”
“Yes, Mademoiselle. But you must not fail. Good fortune, Mademoiselle, adieu!”
“Good fortune, Fayal; a thousand thanks again; and—adieu!”
Her new conductor led her on a few more miles that night; she laid up during the day; at night proceeded under a new guide.
So she passed on from hiding place to hiding place, sometimes lying for days at a time—terrible, torturing delays, during which she dreamed of the Germans advancing over all that Reims-Soissons front and sweeping over the French armies as they had overwhelmed the British in Picardy. And she—she, if she might go on, could prevent them! Many times during the endless hours she lay alone waiting for her guide who did not appear, she crept out from her concealment, determined to force on; but always she learned the futility of attempting to proceed alone.
She was following her sixth guide after Fayal, and it was upon the eleventh evening after her escape from Lauengratz, when suddenly she heard a rough challenge; German soldiers appeared across the path; others leaped up from the right and left; yet others were behind.
Her guide instantly recognized that he had led her into a trap; and he fought, wildly, to try to save her. She fought, too. But they bayoneted him, and, upon their bayonets, they bore him back upon her. A soldier seized her; overpowered her, brutally, and she struggled no longer with hope to fight free, but only to destroy the papers which she still carried. So they pinioned her arms; they half stripped her in searching her; they took her papers, and leaving her guide dead upon the ground, they hurried her with them to their commandant.
This officer instantly suspected her identity. For, in spite of her eleven nights of flight, she was not yet seventy miles from Lauengratz. Disposition of her evidently had been predetermined, pending her recapture; for the officer, after examining her again, dispatched her to a railroad train, under guard. They put her in manacles and, boarding a north-bound train, they took her to a town the name of which she could not learn. From the station they marched her to what appeared to be an old castle, where they at once confined her, alone, in a stone-walled cell.
It possessed a solitary, narrow slit of a window, high up under the ceiling; it boasted for furniture a cot, a chair and bowls. The Germans relieved her of the manacles when they led her into this cell. Not long after she was left alone, light streaked in through the slit of a window; a hand, opening a panel in her door, thrust in a dipper of soup and a chunk of bread.