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."
"No, gnädiges Fräulein, I can do nothing for Herr Hauptmann," the soldier agreed. Of himself he was doubtful whether he should yet leave his gnädiges Fräulein, but he had been commanded, so he went.
The Russians had withdrawn a little; and after the German soldier was gone Ruth stood alone, gazing down at von Forstner's body. She had killed von Forstner and his servant. She had killed them in self-defense and by an act which might have destroyed her as well as them, yet horror shrank her as she saw them lying dead—horror which first had seized her at the idea of individually dealing in death that day long ago when she stood with Gerry in the parlor of the pension upon the Rue des Saints Pères, and when he had told her that the French had taken Louis de Trevenac upon her information, and were to execute him.
If she had killed these men solely to save herself, she must cast herself down beside them. But she had not! That sudden, mad deed which she had just performed—and in the consequences of which she was just beginning to be involved—sprang not from self-defense. It was not sense of escape from personal violation which at this moment chiefly swayed her; it was a sensation of requital, in petty part, for the savageries of that sweep through Belgium of which she had heard four years ago; requital for the Lusitania; for Poland and Serbia; for the bombing of Paris and for that long-range gun whose shells she had seen bursting; for Grand'mère Bergues' daughter and for the other refugees upon the Mirevaux road; for the French girls and women in slavery only a mile from here; for . . . .
She raised her hands to her hair, which was wet, as she was wet all over; she arranged her hair and her clothing as decently as she could. A motor car was coming upon the road from the manor. It stopped directly above, and the soldier and a man in civilian clothes got out; the driver of the car remained in his seat and maneuvered to turn the car about in the narrow road.
The man in civilian clothes, who came down the slope toward the stream, was forty or forty-five years old, Ruth thought. He was a large man, florid-faced and mustached, with the bearing not of servant but of a subordinate—an overseer of some sort, Ruth guessed, or perhaps a resident manager of the estate.
"Good morning, gnädiges Fräulein," he saluted Ruth, breathless from his haste and agitation. "I am Dittman," he made himself known. "What a terrible accident has occurred! Herr Hauptmann is dead, they say; and Josef, too!" He gave barely a glance toward the body of the chauffeur, but knelt at once beside von Forstner's.
"They are both dead," Ruth said quietly. It was plain that von Forstner had been Dittman's master and that Dittman, for the moment at least, accepted Ruth as a friend of von Forstner's, as the soldier had.
"What shall I order done?" Dittman appealed to Ruth, rising.
"Take Hauptmann von Forstner's body to the house, of course," Ruth directed. "Who is at the house?" she inquired.
"Besides the servants, this morning only Herr Adler."
"Who is Herr Adler?"
"Why, he is Hauptmann von Forstner's secretary."
"Then why did he not himself come at once?"
"Word arrived that Herr Hauptmann was dead," Dittman explained. "Herr Adler did not think that you would require him here, gnädiges Fräulein. Since Herr Hauptmann was dead it was more necessary than ever for Herr Adler to remain at the house. Oberst-Lieutenant von Fallenbosch communicates by telephone at this time in the morning; immediately he must be informed."
"Of course," Ruth said.
She was aware that Dittman was observing her more and more curiously, not so much because of her questions and of her ignorance of the household affairs of Captain von Forstner, she thought, as because of her accent. Dittman apparently was not surprised that the lady companion of his master did not know about Adler; and even the fact that she spoke German with an undisguisable foreign accent did not stir suspicion, but only curiosity. Ruth apparently had taken the right tone with this puffing underling by offering no explanations whatever about herself and by demanding them of others.
"You are wet, gnädiges Fräulein," he reminded her solicitously. "I brought the motor car for you. If you will proceed I shall see to all things for Herr Hauptmann."
"Hauptmann von Forstner carried upon himself certain papers for which I now must be responsible," Ruth returned to Dittman.
"Ah, yes; of course, gnädiges Fräulein."
"You may obtain them for me."
Dittman knelt again, obediently, and carefully and methodically went through von Forstner's pockets. A few minutes before, when Ruth had been alone but for the Russian slaves, she had realized that she ought to obtain the papers in those pockets, but her revulsion at making the search had halted her. Now that proved altogether fortunate. Her fate here hung upon little things; and one of those trifles which supported her, undoubtedly, was that she had waited for this Dittman before allowing disturbance of any of von Forstner's effects.
Dittman gathered together everything from the pockets—money, keys, penknife, cigarette case, revolver, and memorandum book, besides two thick packets of folded papers; and he offered all to Ruth, who accepted only the packets and the memorandum book. Dittman assisted her to climb the slope to the waiting car.
"My bags, Dittman," Ruth said to her escort when she was seated. They had been held fairly well away from the water by the position of the wrecked car; and there was more than a chance that the leather had kept dry some of the clothing within. Ruth did not know what lay before her but she could meet it better in fresh garments. Dittman ordered one of the Russians to bring up her bags and place them in the car.
As it sped away to the south Ruth sat back alone in the rear seat. Evidently she had been expected at the manor house; from the border or, perhaps, from Basel or from Lucerne Captain von Forstner had warned his household that he was bringing her with him. Had he described to his inferiors the relationship of his companion to him? Almost surely he had not. If they had arrived together, in the manner planned by von Forstner, his servants swiftly enough could have arrived at their own conclusions; but now that von Forstner was dead—accidentally, as all believed—matters lay so that his servants might judge the nature of her association with their master by the manner in which Ruth bore herself.
Oberst-Lieutenant von Fallenbosch, who communicated by telephone at this time in the morning, suggested perilous complications, but perils were all about her now, in any case. The bold course upon which she was embarked was—if you thought about it—safer, in reality, than any other.
So Ruth steadied herself as the car, clearing the woods, ran beside open acres to a huge and old German manor house set baldly upon a slope above the stream. A man was walking upon the terrace before the door; he sighted the car and started quickly to meet it, but as the car sped up he returned to the terrace and stood upon the lower step at the edge of the drive. He was a short, broadly built but nervous little man, upwards of thirty, spectacled, and with thick hair cropped somewhat after the military fashion; but he was not in uniform and his bearing was that of student or professional man, rather than of the military.
When the car stopped he did not wait for the driver or one of the servants, who now had come out upon the terrace, but he himself opened the door and stood back quickly, staring at Ruth anxiously and rubbing together his fat red hands.
"Herr Adler?" Ruth asked as she stood up.
"Yes, gnädiges Fräulein. You have come from the captain?"
Her drenched condition was witness to the fact, and Ruth observed that, besides, his little eyes sought the packets of papers and the memorandum book which she held.
"I have come from America and more recently from France," Ruth said, stepping down. They were alone now as Adler walked with her across the terrace. "I have come from Lucerne with Captain von Forstner."
"Yes, gnädiges Fräulein, I know; I know. And he is dead, they tell me. It is true that he is dead?"
"He is dead," Ruth confirmed. And she saw that the fact of von Forstner's death bore far different consequences to Adler than to Dittman. The secretary was charged now with responsibilities which had been his master's; it was these, more than the physical accident of von Forstner's death, which overwhelmed and dismayed him. "But I have recovered his reports and personal memoranda," Ruth assured.
"Yes, yes. That is very fortunate."
"Which I shall go over with you as quickly as I can change to dry clothes, Herr Adler," she continued. She did not know whether the secretary had been about to make demand for his master's papers; if he had, she had anticipated him. "Oberst-Lieutenant von Fallenbosch has telephoned?" Ruth asked.
"Ten minutes ago, gnädiges Fräulein."
"Of course you told him that Captain von Forstner is dead."
"Of course."
"Well, what is he to do?"
"He is coming here at once."
"That's good," Ruth managed, steadily enough. "Where was he when he telephoned."
"At Offenburg, gnädiges Fräulein."
"Then he will arrive in about an hour?"
"At noon, he said. But first there is much," Adler's nervousness increased, "much to be made ready for him."
"I will not delay," Ruth promised.
They had entered the hall—a large, dark hall with a wide, black stairway rising at the side.
"I shall send your bags instantly to your room, gnädiges Fräulein," Adler assured. He halted, giving her over to a maid servant for guidance. "Show Fräulein Brun to her apartment," Adler ordered. "I shall send stimulant," he added.
So she was Fräulein Brun and she had been expected here! Captain von Forstner had sent word that he was bringing her and had ordered her apartment prepared; and his advices, even to Adler, had ended with that.
Ruth followed the maid into a bedroom and boudoir, where, a moment later, her bags were brought. Examination proved that they had served to keep her packed clothing dry; and, with the maid's assistance, Ruth took off her soaked garments. The maid took down her hair and brushed it out to dry; another maid appeared with the stimulant which Adler had promised and also with hot broth and biscuit. Ruth took this gladly and felt stronger. She let herself relax, half dressed, in a chair while the maid fanned and brushed her hair. From the window she saw a car coming to the manor with von Forstner's body; a few moments later she heard the feet of bearers pass her room door. They appeared to take him into apartments just beyond—those which had been his own, undoubtedly. Ruth instructed the maid to do her hair and she would finish dressing.
Dismissing the maid, she remained alone in the room. She had kept with her the papers which von Forstner had carried, and while she had been under observation she had refrained from examining them. Now she opened the packets and found that those papers which had lain inside were almost dry; and swiftly spreading them before her she saw that they appeared to be typewritten observations upon economic matters of the character which a neutral Norwegian gentleman might make. They must be, in fact—Ruth knew—cipher memoranda of very different matters; they would probably not contain any summaries, for von Forstner could carry all summaries in his head. He would have committed to writing only details and items—some of them petty, taken by themselves, but others of more importance. They would have to do with conditions in France, but while meant for German information their contents must carry quite as important advices for the allies, for they would betray the particular locations with which the Germans were concerning themselves and thereby disclose the front of the next attack.
Ruth sorted the pages over swiftly and, finding that their texts fell under nine heads, she removed the twenty-eight pages which were under five of these heads; the other twenty-three pages she restored to the two packets. She thrust the removed pages under her corset; and, carrying the others in their wet packets, she left the room. Descending the wide, black stairs, she found Adler pacing the hallway as he had paced the terrace.
He led her into a large, high, dark paneled, mullion-windowed room where old armor and battle maces stood upon the black walls above modern office filing cases and with an ancient carved table topped with glass and desk blotter; before this was an ordinary swivel chair. Adler motioned Ruth to this as he put out his hand for the packets.
"The reports now, please, gnädiges Fräulein!" Adler asked. "A transcription immediately must be ready for Oberst-Lieutenant von Fallenbosch! He will not find it like talking with Hauptmann von Forstner; but we must do what we can!"
Ruth handed him the packets and she sat down in the swivel chair while, on the other side of the glass table top, Adler spread out the sheets. Their number appeared to satisfy him; at least he questioned nothing, but, having the pages in order, he unlocked a small, flat drawer and took out three paper stencils. The apertures through the paper differed, Ruth saw, with each stencil. Adler laid them in order over the first three sheets, and, bending, read to himself the words which remained in sight under the stencils. Ruth could not see what he read nor the brief transcript he made with pencil upon a pad. He shifted the stencils to the next three sheets, read the result again, made his transcript, and again shifted.
Adler came to the end and gazed up at Ruth. The other women whom Hauptmann von Forstner had invited to Lauengratz and who had used those apartments above evidently had been of unquestionable loyalty, for the secretary, when he gazed up at this guest of his dead master, did not challenge her. He sought information to prepare himself for the visit of Oberst-Lieutenant von Fallenbosch, not half an hour away.
"Besides these, gnädiges Fräulein," he appealed anxiously, "did Herr Hauptmann make no verbal mention of other matters?"
Ruth shook her head. "Personal matters between him and myself," she said. "But he did not go into the reports of others with me at all. In fact, he would not even receive my report; since I was coming into Germany I could make it myself to Oberst-Lieutenant Fallenbosch. That would be safer, he said."
This true recital threw Adler into gesturing despair. "Exactly; it is precisely what he would do! It is safest; it is most discreet to put nothing, or as little as possible, upon paper. That is always his obsession! So discreet! When I say to him it is not always safer he laughs or tells me to mind my own business! Discretion! It is because he is so obsessed by it that he directs our secret service for the district. 'Have merely an ordered mind, a good memory, Adler,' he always says to me, 'and nothing will be misplaced, nothing will get astray, nothing will be obtained by others.'
"'Yes, Herr Hauptmann,' I say, 'but suppose something happen to that ordered mind and that good memory! What then?' Ah! He laughs at me and pats me on the back so indulgently. But where is that ordered mind; where now is that memory to which the most important things may be committed? Well, he is away from the trouble," the secretary raged in his dismay. "He can hear nothing which Oberst-Lieutenant von Fallenbosch may say of him. But I—I will get it. . . . Yet you can make your report to him. At least, that much may be added. You have come from where, Fräulein Brun? Which front?" he beseeched hopefully.
"From Picardy," Ruth said. "I had the honor to be assigned to Roisel and to attach myself, particularly, to the British Fifth Army."
"Ah! I salute you, gnädiges Fräulein, and your comrades for the wonderful work you have done. But the importance of that is past, Fräulein Brun! Since then where have you been?"
"My duty, as I interpreted it, was to retreat with the British; so I was swept back with them to Compiègne. Since then, as I explained to Herr Hauptmann, passport difficulties detained me in Paris."
"Then all from Reims to Soissons is in Herr Hauptmann's ordered mind! It is, as all the most essential would be, in his 'good memory'! And, by the latest, today the report was to start to great headquarters!"
The secretary jerked about from Ruth and hurried back and forth across the room, head down and clapping his hands loudly together in his despair; and Ruth, watching him, sat stark. The importance of the Picardy front was past, he had said—that front where, in the tremendous assaults of March, the Germans had thrust their great salient between Amiens and Paris and where all the allies were working, day and night, strengthening their lines against a new attack! The Flanders front, where still the German armies were hurling themselves toward the channel? Adler did not even mention that. The "most essential" was the front from Reims to Soissons, all quiet now and one which—so far as Ruth knew—the allies expected to remain quiet and where they yet were unprepared for a great attack.
But there the next tremendous assault must be coming; and it was so near that, by the latest, today report of conditions upon that front was to start to great headquarters! Well, whatever was written about that front Ruth had now in the papers folded tight against her body and what von Forstner had entrusted to his ordered mind was lost forever! Keenly she watched Adler while, still striking his hands together in his helplessness, he strode swiftly up and down.
He spun about to her suddenly, and for an instant Ruth believed he was about to challenge her. But the secretary could not yet reach suspicion of the comrade of his Herr Hauptmann and for whom Hauptmann von Forstner had instructed rooms to be made ready beside his own and who herself had completed the journey to Lauengratz alone and of her own will and bearing Herr Hauptmann's papers.
"You removed these yourself from Herr Hauptmann's body?"
"No; Dittman procured them for me. I was somewhat injured myself, you see," she explained her neglect. "And a little faint, at first."
"Of course; of course! But Dittman is a thick skull! He might not have suspected where Herr Hauptmann might have concealed the most important memoranda!" Adler livened with hope. "And there were Russians, I understand, who first found you and dragged out Herr Hauptmann. They are mere brutes, incapable of understanding anything. Nevertheless they may have meddled. I shall send and see and at once myself examine the body of Herr Hauptmann!"
He turned about and gazed at his papers; he swept them together and into a drawer. The stencils, by which he had read the ciphers, went with them. "You will remain here, gnädiges Fräulein," he half commanded, half requested, and he hastened from the room.
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.