Ruth Fielding at the War Front Part 12

It was actually wonderful how smoothly the ambulance ran.

Occasionally they were caught in a tight corner and the machine jounced so that moans of agony were wrung from the lips of the wounded behind them on the stretchers. This, however, occurred but seldom.

Once one of the men begged for water--water to drink and its coolness on his head. They were pa.s.sing a trickling stream that looked clear and refreshing.

"Let me get out a moment and get him some," begged Ruth.

"Can't do it. Against orders. We're commanded not to taste water from any stream, spring, or well in this sector--let alone give it to the wounded. n.o.body knows when the water is poisoned."

"But the Germans have been gone from this district so long now!" she cried.

"They may have their spies here. In fact," grumbled Holdness, "we are sure they do have friends in the sector."

"Oh!"

"You know that Devil Corner Charlie Bragg drove you past the other night? The sh.e.l.ls have torn that all to pieces. We have to go fully two miles around by another road to get to Clair. We don't pa.s.s Mother Gervaise's place any more."

Ruth looked at him sadly but questioningly.

"Do you believe that story they tell about one of our young officers having gone over to the enemy?" she asked.

Holdness flushed vividly. "I didn't know him. I've got no opinion on the matter, Miss Fielding," he said. "But somebody has mapped out the whole sector for the Huns--and it has cost lives, and ammunition. You can't blame folks for being suspicious."

The answer quenched her conversation. Ruth scarcely spoke again during the remainder of the journey.

They welcomed her in most friendly fashion at the Clair Hospital. But the first thing she did after depositing her bag in her cell was to go to the telegraph office and put before the military censor the following message addressed to the prefect of police at Lyse,

"Will you please communicate with M. Lafrane. I have something of importance to tell him."

She signed her name and occupation in full to this, and was finally a.s.sured that it would be sent. M. Lafrane was of the secret police, and Ruth Fielding had been in communication with him on a previous occasion.

Several days pa.s.sed with no reply from her communication to the police.

Nor did any news reach her from the field hospital where she had been engaged, nor from her friends at the front. Indeed, those working near the battle lines really know less of what is being done in this war than civilians in America, for instance.

Almost every night the guns thundered, and it was reported that the Americans were making sorties into the German lines and bearing back both prisoners and plunder. But just what was being accomplished Ruth Fielding had no means of knowing.

Not having seen or heard from Henriette Dupay since her return, early in the following week Ruth started out to walk briskly to the Dupay farm one afternoon.

Of late the aeroplanes had become very numerous over this sector. They were, for the most part, American machines. But this afternoon she chanced to see one of the French Nieuports at close quarters.

These are the scouting, or battle planes, and carry but two men and a machine gun. She heard the motor some moments before seeing the aeroplane rise over the tree tops. She knew it must have leaped from a large field on this side of the Dupay farm and not far below the gateway of the Chateau Marchand.

Ruth stopped to gaze upward at the soaring airplane. Her figure stood out plainly in the country road and the two men aboard the Nieuport must have immediately spied her.

The machine dipped and scaled downward until she could have thrown a stone upward and hit it. One of the men--masked and helmeted as the flying men always are--leaned from his seat, and she saw him looking down upon her through the tangle of stay-wires.

Then he dropped a small white object that fell like a plummet at her feet!

"What in the world can that be?" murmured the girl to herself.

For a breath she was frightened. Although the aeroplane carried the French insignia it might be an enemy machine. She, too, was obsessed with the fear of spies!

But the object that fell was not an explosive bomb. It was a weighted ball of oiled silk. As the machine soared again and rapidly rose to the upper air levels, the girl picked up the strange object and burst it open.

The lead pellets that weighted the globe were scattered on the ground.

Within there was nothing else but a strip of heavy doc.u.ment paper. On this was traced in a handwriting she knew well, this unsigned message:

"Don't believe everything you hear."

It was Tom Cameron's handwriting--and Ruth knew that the message was meant for her eye and her eye only!

CHAPTER XII

AUNT ABELARD

Of course nothing just like this ever happened save in a fairy story--or in real life. The paper without address, but meant only for Ruth Fielding, had fallen from the aeroplane. She had seen it fall at her feet and could not be mistaken.

Who the two men in the French Nieuport were she could not know. Masked and hooded as they were, she could distinguish the features of neither the pilot nor the man who had dropped the paper bomb. But--she was sure of this--they were somehow in communication with Tom Cameron.

And Tom Cameron was supposed to have gone across the lines to the Germans, or--as Ruth believed--had been captured by them. Yet, if he was a captive, how had he been able to send her this message?

Again, how did he know she was worried about him? He must have reason to suspect that a story was being circulated regarding his unfaithfulness.

Who were those two flying men? Were they German spies? Had Tom been a prisoner in the hands of the Huns, would spies have brought this word from him to her?

And how--and how--and how----?

Her queries and surmises were utterly unanswerable. She turned the bit of paper over and over in her fingers. She could not be mistaken about Tom's handwriting. He had penciled those words.

It was true, any friend of Tom's who knew his handwriting and might have picked up the loaded paper bomb, would have considered the written line a personal message.

"Don't believe everything you hear."

But, then, what friends had Tom in this sector of the battle front save his military a.s.sociates and Ruth Fielding? The girl never for one moment considered that the written line might have been meant for anybody but herself.

And she did with it the very wisest thing she could have done. She tore the paper into the tiniest of bits, and, as she continued her walk to the Dupay farm, she dribbled the sc.r.a.ps along the gra.s.sy road.

She began to have a faint and misty idea of what it all meant--Tom's disappearance, the general belief among his comrades that he was a traitor, and this communication which had reached her hands in seemingly so wonderful a manner.

Tom Cameron had been selected for some dangerous and secret mission.