Ruth Fielding Homeward Bound; A Red Cross Worker's Ocean Perils

“Hard luck for one of our best flying men. Ralph Stillinger. You’ve heard of him? The French call him an ace, for he has brought down more than five Hun machines.

“I hear that he took up a passenger the other day. An army captain, I understand, but I did not catch the name. There was a sudden raid from the German side, and Stillinger’s machine was seen to fly off toward the sea in an endeavor to get around the flank of the Hun squadron.

“Forced so far away from the French and American planes, it was thought Stillinger must have got into serious trouble. At least, it is reported here that an American airplane was seen fighting one of those sea-going-Zeppelins – the kind the Hun uses to bomb London and the English coast, you know.

“Hard luck for Stillinger and his passenger, sure enough. The American airplane was seen to fall, and, although a searching party discovered the wrecked machine, neither its pilot nor the passenger was found.”

Charlie Bragg had no idea when he wrote this that he was causing Ruth Fielding, homeward bound, heartache and anxiety. She dared tell Helen nothing about this, although she read the letter before the Admiral Pekhard drew away from the pier and Helen and Jennie went ashore.

Of course, Stillinger’s passenger might not have been Tom Cameron. Yet Tom had been going to the aviation field expecting to fly with the American ace. And the fact that Tom had allowed her, Ruth, to sail without a word of remembrance almost convinced the girl of the Red Mill that something untoward had happened to him.

It was a secret which she felt she could share with nobody. She set sail upon the venturesome voyage to America with this added weight of sorrow on her heart.

CHAPTER VI – A NEW EXPERIENCE

Tom landed from a slowly crawling military train at a place some miles behind the actual battleline and far west of the sector in which his division had been fighting for a month. This division was in a great rest camp; but Tom did not want rest. He craved excitement – something new.

In a few hours an automobile which he shared with a free-lance newspaper man brought him to a town which had been already bombarded half a dozen times since Von Kluck’s forced retreat after the first advance on Paris.

As Tom walked out to the aviation field, where Ralph Stillinger’s letter had advised his friend he was to be found, all along the streets the American captain saw posters announcing Cave Voûteé with the number of persons to be accommodated in these places of refuge, such number ranging from fifteen to sixty.

The bomb-proof cellars were protected by sandbags and were conveniently located so that people might easily find shelter whenever the German Fokkers or Tauben appeared. Naturally, as the town was so near the aviation field, it was bound to be a mark for the Hun bombing planes.

Sentinels were posted at every street corner. There were three of the anti-aircraft .75‘s set up in the town. Just outside the place were the camps of three flying escadrilles, side by side. One of these was the American squadron to which Ralph Stillinger, Tom’s friend, was attached.

Each camp of the airmen looked to Tom, when he drew near, like the “pitch” of a road show. With each camp were ten or twelve covered motor-trucks with their tentlike trailers, and three automobiles for the use of the officers and pilots.

Tom had not realized before what the personnel of each équipé was like. There were a dozen artillery observers; seven pilots; two mechanicians to take care of each airplane, besides others for general repair work; and chauffeurs, orderlies, servants, wireless operators, photographers and other attachés – one hundred and twenty-five men in all.

Tom Cameron’s appearance was hailed with delight by several men who had known him at college. Not all of his class had gone to the Plattsburg officer’s training camp. Several were here with Ralph Stillinger, the one ace in this squadron.

“You may see some real stuff if you can stay a day or two,” they told the young captain of infantry.

“I suppose if there is a fight I’ll see it from the ground,” returned Tom. “Thanks! I’ve seen plenty of air-fights from the trenches. I want something better than that. Ralph said he’d take me up.”

“Don’t grouch too soon, young fellow,” said Stillinger, laughing. “We’re thirty miles or so from the present front. But in this new, swift machine of mine (it’s one of the first from home, with a liberty motor) we can jump into any ruction Fritzie starts over the lines in something like fifteen minutes. I’ll joyride you, Tommy, if nothing happens, to-morrow.”

It was not altogether as easily arranged as that. Permission had to be obtained for Ralph to take his friend up. The commander of the squadron had no special orders for the next day. He agreed that Ralph might go up with his passenger early in the morning, unless something interfered.

The young men were rather late turning in, for “the crowd” got together to swap experiences; it seemed to Tom as though he had scarcely closed his eyes when an orderly shook him and told him that Lieutenant Stillinger was waiting for him out by Number Four hangar – wherever that might be.

Tom crept out, yawning. He dressed, and as he passed the kitchen a bare-armed cook thrust a huge mug of coffee and a sandwich into his hands.

“If you’re going up in the air, Captain, you’ll be peckish,” the man said. “Get around that, sir.”

Tom did so, gratefully. Then he stumbled out into the dark field, for there were no lights allowed because of the possibility of lurking Huns in the sky. He ran into the orderly, the man who had awakened him, who was coming back to see where he was. The orderly led Tom to the spot where Stillinger and the mechanician were tuning up the machine.

“Didn’t know but you’d backed out,” chuckled the flying man.

“Your grandmother!” retorted Tom cheerfully. “I stopped for a bite and a mug of coffee.”

“You haven’t been eating enough to overload the machine, have you?” asked Stillinger. “I don’t want to zoom the old girl. The motor shakes her bad enough, as it is.”

“Come again!” exclaimed Tom. “What’s the meaning of ‘zoom’?”

“Overstrain. Putting too much on her. Oh, there is a new language to learn if you are going to be a flying man.”

“I’m not sure I want to be a flying man,” said Tom. “This is merely a try-out. Just tell me what to look out for and when to jump.”

“Don’t jump,” warned Stillinger. “Nothing doing that way. Loss of speed —perte de vitesse the French call it – is the most common accident that can happen when one is up in the air in one of these planes. But even if that occurs, old man, take my advice and stick. You’ll be altogether too high up for a safe jump, believe me!”

They got under way with scarcely any jar, and with tail properly elevated the airplane was aimed by Ralph Stillinger for the upper reaches of the air. They went up rather steeply; but the ace was not “zooming”; he knew his machine.

There is too much noise in an airship to favor conversation. Gestures between the pilot and the observation man, or the photographer, usually have to do duty for speech. Nor is there much happening to breed discussion. The pilot’s mind must be strictly on the business of guiding his machine.

With a wave of his hand Stillinger called Tom’s attention to the far-flung horizon. Trees at their feet were like weeds and the roads and waterways like streamers of crinkled tape. The earth was just a blur of colors – browns and grays, with misty blues in the distance. The human eye unaided could not distinguish many objects as far as the prospect spread before their vision. But of a sudden Tom Cameron realized that that mass of blurred blue so far to the westward, and toward which they were darting, must be the sea.

The airplane mounted, and mounted higher. The recording barometer which Tom could easily read from where he sat, reached the two-thousand mark. His eyes were shining now through the mask which he wore. His first perturbation had passed and he began actually to enjoy himself.

This time of dawn was as safe as any hour for a flight. It is near mid-day when the heat of the sun causes those disturbances in the upper atmosphere strata that the French pilots call remous, meaning actually “whirlpools.” Yet these phenomena can be met at almost any hour.

The machine had gathered speed now. She shook terrifically under the throbbing of the heavy motor – a motor which was later found to be too powerful for the two-seated airplanes.

At fifty miles an hour they rushed westward. Tom was cool now. He was enjoying the new experience. This would be something to tell the girls about. He would wire Ruth that he had made the trip in safety, and she would get the message before she went aboard the Admiral Pekhard, at Brest.

Why, Brest was right over there – somewhere! Vaguely he could mark the curve of miles upon miles of the French coast. What a height this was!

And then suddenly the airplane struck a whirlpool and dropped about fifty feet with all the unexpectedness of a similar fall in an express elevator. She halted abruptly and with an awful shock that set her to shivering and rolling like a ship in a heavy sea.

Tom was all but jolted out of his seat; but the belt held him. He turned, open-mouthed, upon his friend the pilot. But before he could yell a question the airplane shot up again till it struck the solid air.

“My heavens!” shouted Tom at last. “What do you call that?”

“Real flying!” shouted Stillinger in return. “How do you like it?”

Tom had no ready reply. He was not sure that he liked it at all! But it certainly was a new experience.

CHAPTER VII – THE ZEPPELIN

Stillinger was giving his full attention to managing his aircraft now. They were circling in a great curve toward the north. This route would bring them nearer to the lines of battle. The pilot turned to his passenger and tried to warn him of what he was about to do. But Tom had recovered his self-possession and was staring straight ahead with steady intensity.

So Stillinger shut off the motor and the airplane pitched downward. A fifty-mile drive is a swift pace anywhere – on the ground or in the air; but as the airplane fell the air fairly roared past their ears and the pace must have been nearer eighty miles an hour.

The machine was pointing down so straight that the full weight of the two young men was upon their feet. They were literally standing erect. Stillinger shot another glance at his passenger. Tom’s lips were parted again and, although he could not hear it, the pilot knew Tom had emitted another shout of excitement.

The earth, so far below, seemed rushing up to meet them. To volplane from such a height and at such speed is almost the keenest test of courage that can be put upon a man who for the first time seeks to emulate the bird.

Nor is real danger lacking. If the pilot does not redress his plane at exactly the right moment he will surely dash it and himself into the earth.

While still some hundreds of feet from the earth, Stillinger leveled his airplane and started the motor once more. They skimmed the earth’s surface for some distance and then began to spiral upward.

It was just then that a black speck appeared against the clouded sky over the not-far-distant battleline. They had not been near enough to see the trenches even from the upper strata of air to which the airplane had first risen. There was a haze hanging over the fighting battalions of friend and foe alike. This black speck was something that shot out of the cloud and upward, being small, but clearly defined at this distance.

The morning light was growing. The sun’s red upper rim was just showing over the rugged line of the Vosges. Had they been nearer to the earth it would have been possible to hear the reveille from the various camps.

The whole sector had been quiet. Suddenly there were several puffs of smoke, and then, high in the air, and notably near to that black speck against the cloud, other bursts of smoke betrayed aerial shells. Stillinger’s lips mouthed the word, “Hun!” and Tom Cameron knew that he referred to the flying machine that hung poised over No Man’s Land, between the lines.

The aerial gunners were trying to pot the enemy flying machine. But of a sudden a group of similar machines, flying like wild geese, appeared out of the fog-bank. There must have been a score of them.

Taking advantage of the morning fog, which was thicker to the north and east than it was behind the Allied lines, the Germans had sent their machines into the air in squadrons. A great raid was on!

Out of the fog-bank at a dozen points winged the Fokkers and the smaller fighting airplanes. It was a surprise attack, and had been excellently planned. The Allies were ready for no such move.

Yet the gunners became instantly active for miles and miles along the lines. In the back areas, too, a barrage of aerial shells was thrown up. While from the various aviation camps the French and British flying men began to mount, singly and in small groups, to meet the enemy attack.

The raid was not aimed against the American sectors to the east. They were a long way from this point. Stillinger had flown far and was now nowhere near his own unit, if that should come into the fight.

Nor was he prepared to fight. He would not be allowed to – unless attacked. He had been permitted to take up a passenger, and after winging his way along the battle front to the sea, was expected to return to the aviation field from which he had risen.

Nevertheless, the machine gun in the nose of the airplane needed but to have the canvas cover stripped off to be ready for action. Tom Cameron’s flashing glance caught the pilot’s attention.

“Are we going to get into it?” questioned Tom.

“Don’t unhook that belt!” commanded Stillinger. “We can do nothing yet.”

“It’s a surprise,” said Tom. “We must help.”

“You sit still!” returned his friend. “I presume you can handle that make of gat?”

Tom nodded with confidence. Stillinger shot the airplane to an upper level and headed to the north of west, endeavoring to turn the flank of the farthest Hun squadron. Over the lines the yellow smoke now rolled and billowed. An intense air barrage was being sent up. They saw a German machine stagger, swoop downward, and burst into flames before it disappeared into the smoke cloud over No Man’s Land.

Stillinger knew he was disobeying orders; but his high courage and the plain determination of his passenger to help in the fight if need arose, caused him to take a chance. It was taking just such chances that had made him an ace.

Yet, as the airplane swung higher and higher, yet nearer and nearer to the group of enemy machines nearest the sea, and as the bursts of artillery fire grew louder, it was plain that this was going to be a “hot corner.”

The rolling smoke and the fog hid a good deal of the battle. Suddenly there burst out of the murk a squadron of flying machines with the German cross painted on the under side of their wings. With them rose three French attacking airplanes, and the chatter of the machine guns became incessant.

There were eight of the enemy planes; eight to three was greater odds than Americans could observe without wishing to take a hand in the fight.

Stillinger shot his airplane up at a sharp angle, striving to get above the German machines. Once above them, by pitching the nose of his machine, the enemy would be brought under the muzzle of the machine gun which already Tom Cameron had stripped of its canvas covering.

They were between six and seven thousand feet in the air now. Without the mask, the passenger would never have been able to endure the rarified atmosphere at this altitude. Unused as he was to aviation, however, he showed the ace that he was an asset, not a liability.

The free-lance airplane was observed by the Germans, however, and three of the eight machines sprang upward to over-reach the American. It was a race in speed and endurance for the upper reaches of the air.

The fog-bank hung thickest over the sea, and the racing American airplane was close to the coastline. But so high were they, and so shrouded was the coast in fog, that Tom, looking down, could see little or nothing of the shore.

Suddenly swerving his airplane, Stillinger darted into the clammy fog-cloud. It offered refuge from the Germans and gave him a chance to manoeuvre in a way to take the enemy unaware.

The moment they were wrapped about by the cloud the American pilot shot the airplane downward. He no longer strove to meet the three German machines on the high levels. If he could get under them, and slant the nose of his machine sharply upward, the machine gun would do quite as much damage to the underside of the German airplane as could be done from above. Indeed, the underside of the tail of a flying machine is quite as vulnerable a part as any.

But flying in the fog was an uncertain and trying experience. Where the German airplanes were, Stillinger could only guess. He shut off his engine for a moment that they might listen for the sputtering reports of the Hun motors.

It was then, to his, as well as to Tom Cameron’s, amazement, that they heard the stuttering reports of an engine – a much heavier engine than that of even a Fokker or Gotha – an engine that shook the air all about them. And the noise rose from beneath!

Stillinger could keep his engine shut off but a few seconds. As the popping of its exhaust began once more a bulky object was thrust up through the fog below. That is, it seemed thrust up to meet them, because the American plane was falling.

In half a minute, however, their machine was steadied. Tom uttered a great shout. He was looking down through the wire stays at the enormous bulk of an airship, the like of which he had never before seen close to.

Once he had examined the wreck of a Zeppelin after it had been brought down behind the French lines. These mammoth ships were being used by the Hun only to cross the North Sea and the Channel to bomb English cities. This present one must have strayed from its direct course, for it was headed seaward and in a southwest direction.

Taking advantage of the fog, it was putting to sea, having flown directly over the British or Belgian lines. While the fighting planes attacked the Allied squadrons of the air, thus making a diversion, this big Zeppelin endeavored to get by and carry on out to sea, its objective point perhaps being a distant part of the Channel coast of England.

Where it was going, or the reason therefore, did not much interest Ralph Stillinger and Tom Cameron. The fact that the great airship was beneath their airplane was sufficiently startling to fill the excited minds of the two young Americans.

Were they observed by the Huns? Could they wreak some serious damage upon the Zeppelin before their own presence – and their own peril – was apprehended by the crew of the great airship?

CHAPTER VIII – AFLOAT

The Admiral Pekhard nosed her way out of the port just as dusk fell. She dropped her pilot off the masked light at the end of the last great American dock – a dock big enough to hold the Leviathan– and thereafter followed the stern lights of a destroyer. Thus she got into the roadstead, and thence into the open sea.

The work of the Allied and American navies at this time was such that not all ships returning to America could be convoyed through the submarine zone. This ship on which Ruth Fielding had taken passage for home was accompanied by the destroyer only for a few miles off Brest Harbor.

The passengers, however, did not know this. They were kept off the open decks during the night, and before morning the Admiral Pekhard was entirely out of sight of land, and out of sight of every other vessel as well. Therefore neither Ruth nor any other of the passengers was additionally worried by the fact that the craft was quite unguarded.

The Admiral Pekhard mounted a gun fore and aft, and the crews of these guns were under strict naval discipline. They were on watch, turn and turn about, all through the day and night for the submarines which, of course, were somewhere in these waters.

The Admiral Pekhard was not a fast ship; but she was very comfortably furnished, well manned, and was said to be an even sailing vessel in stormy weather. She had been bearing wounded men back to England for months, but was now being sent to America to bring troops over to take the place of the wounded English fighters.

Ruth learned these few facts and some others at dinner that night. There were some wounded American and Canadian officers going home; but for the most part the passengers in the first cabin were Red Cross workers, returning commissioners both military and civil, a group of Congressmen who had been getting first-hand information of war conditions.

Then there were a few people whom the girl could not exactly place. For instance, there was the woman who sat next to her at the dinner table.

She was not an old woman, but her short hair, brushed straight back over her ears like an Americanized Chinaman’s, was streaked with gray. She was sallow, pale-lipped, and with a pair of very bright black eyes – snapping eyes, indeed. She wore her clothes as carelessly as she might have worn a suit of gunnysacking on a desert island. Her eyeglasses were prominent, astride a more prominent nose. She was not uninteresting looking.

“As aggressive as a gargoyle,” Ruth thought. “And almost as homely! Yet she surely possesses brains.”

On her other hand at table Ruth found a kindly faced Red Cross officer of more than middle age, who offered her aid at a moment when a friend was appreciated. Ruth did very well with the oysters and soup; and she made out with the fish course. But when meat and vegetables and a salad came on, the girl had to be helped in preparing the food on her plate.

The black-eyed woman watched the girl of the Red Mill curiously, seeing her left arm bandaged.

“Hurt yourself?” she asked shortly, in rather a gruff tone.

“No,” said Ruth simply. “I was hurt. I did not do it myself.”

“Ah-ha!” ejaculated the strange woman. “Are you literal, or merely smart?”

“I am only exact,” Ruth told her.

“So! You did not hurt yourself? How, then?” and she glanced significantly at the girl’s bandaged arm.

“Why, do you know,” the girl of the Red Mill said, flushing a little, “there is a country called Germany, in Central Europe, and the German Kaiser and his people are attacking France and other countries. And one of the cheerful little tricks those Germans play is to send over bombing machines to bomb our hospitals. I happened to be working in a hospital they bombed.”

“Ah-ha!” said the woman coolly. “Then you are merely smart, after all.”

“No!” said Ruth, suddenly losing her vexation, for this person she decided was not quite responsible. “No. For, if I were really smart, I should have been so far behind the lines that the Hun would never have found me.”

The black-eyed woman seemed to feel Ruth’s implied scorn after all.

“Oh!” she said, resetting her eyeglasses with both hands, “I have been in Paris all through the war.”

“Oh, then you’d heard about it?” Ruth intimated. “Well!”

“I certainly know all about the war,” said the woman shortly.

The girl of the Red Mill seldom felt antagonism toward people – even unpleasant people. But there was something about this woman that she found very annoying. She turned her bandaged shoulder to her, and gave her attention to the Red Cross officer.

Strangely enough, the queer-looking woman continued to put herself in Ruth’s way. After dinner she sought her out in a corner of the saloon where Ruth was listening to the music. The windows of the saloon were shaded so that no light could get out; but it was quite cozy and cheerful therein.

“You are Miss Fielding, I see by the purser’s list,” said the curious person, staring at Ruth through her glasses.

“I have not the pleasure of knowing you,” returned the girl of the Red Mill. “Can I do anything for you?”

“I am Irma Lentz. I have been studying in Paris. This war is a hateful thing. It has almost ruined my career. It has got so now that one cannot work in peace even in the Latin Quarter of the town. War, war, war! That is all one hears. I am going back to New York to see if I can find peace and quietness – where one may work without being bothered.”