Ruth Fielding In the Red Cross; Doing Her Best For Uncle Sam

Fortunately, the major was not looking at Ruth as he spoke, but was filling out her commission papers for the new place she had accepted. The girl’s emotion at that moment was too great to be wholly hidden.

Rose Mantel to recommend her for any position! It seemed unbelievable! Unless —

The thought came to Ruth that the woman in black wished her out of the way. She feared the girl might say something regarding the Robinsburg fire that would start an official inquiry here in France regarding Mrs. Mantel and her particular friends. Was that the basis for the woman in black’s desire to get Ruth out of the way? Should the latter tell this medical officer, here and now, just what she thought of Mrs. Mantel?

How crass it would sound in his ears if she did so! Rose Mantel had warmly recommended Ruth for a position that the girl felt was just what she wanted.

She could not decide before the major handed her the papers and an order for transportation in an ambulance going to Clair. He again shook hands with her. His abrupt manner showed that he was a busy man and that he had no more time to give to her affairs.

“Get your passport viséed before you start. Never neglect your passport over here in these times,” advised the major.

Should she speak? She hesitated, and the major sat down to his desk and took up his pen again.

“Good-day, Miss Fielding,” he said. “And the best of luck!”

The girl left the office, still in a hesitating frame of mind. There were yet several hours before she left the town. Her bags were quickly packed. All the workers of the Red Cross “traveled light,” as Clare Biggars laughingly said.

Ruth decided that she could not confide in Clare. Already the Western girl was quite enamored of the smiling, snaky Rose Mantel. It would be useless to ask Clare to watch the woman. Nor could Ruth feel that it would be wise to go to the French police and tell them of her suspicions concerning the woman in black.

The French have a very high regard for the American Red Cross – as they have for their own Croix Rouge. They can, and do, accept assistance for their needy poilus and for others from the American Red Cross, because, in the end, the organization is international and is not affiliated with any particular religious sect.

To accuse one of the Red Cross workers in this great hospital at Lyse would be very serious – no matter to what Ruth’s suspicions pointed. The girl could not bring herself to do that.

When she went to the prefect of police to have her passport viséed she found a white-mustached, fatherly man, who took a great interest in her as an Americaine mademoiselle who had come across the ocean to aid France.

“I kiss your hand, Mademoiselle!” he said. “Your bravery and your regard for my country touches me deeply. Good fortune attend your efforts at Clair. You may be under bombardment there, my child. It is possible. We shall hope for your safety.”

Ruth thanked him for his good wishes, and, finally, was tempted to give some hint of her fears regarding the supposed Professor Perry and the Italian Clare had spoken of.

“They may be perfectly straightforward people,” Ruth said; “but where I was engaged in Red Cross work in America these two men – I am almost sure they are the same – worked under the names of Legrand and José, one supposedly a Frenchman and the other a Mexican. There was a fire and property was destroyed. Legrand and José were suspected in the matter, but I believe they got away without being arrested.”

“Mademoiselle, you put me under further obligations,” declared the police officer. “I shall make it my business to look up these two men – and their associates.”

“But, Monsieur, I may be wrong.”

“If it is proved that they are in disguise, that is sufficient. We are giving spies short shrift nowadays.”

His stern words rather troubled Ruth. Yet she believed she had done her duty in announcing her suspicions of the two men. Of Rose Mantel she said nothing. If the French prefect made a thorough investigation, as he should, he could not fail to discover the connection between the men and the chief of the Red Cross supply unit at the hospital.

Ruth’s arrangements were made in good season, and Clare and the other girls bade her a warm good-bye at the door of their pension. The ambulance that was going to Clair proved to be an American car of famous make with an ambulance body, and driven by a tall, thin youth who wore shell-bowed glasses. He was young and gawky and one could see hundreds of his like leaving the city high schools in America at half-past three o’clock, or pacing the walks about college campuses.

He looked just as much out of place in the strenuous occupation of ambulance driver as anyone could look. He seemingly was a “bookish” young man who would probably enjoy hunting a Greek verb to its lair. Tom Cameron would have called him “a plug” – a term meaning an over-faithful student.

Ruth climbed into the seat beside this driver. She then had no more than time to wave her hand to the girls before the ambulance shot away from the curb, turned a corner on two wheels, and, with the staccato blast of a horn that sounded bigger than the car itself, sent dogs and pedestrians flying for their lives.

“Goodness!” gasped Ruth when she caught her breath. Then she favored the bespectacled driver with a surprised stare. He looked straight ahead, and, as they reached the edge of the town, he put on still more speed, and the girl began to learn why people who can afford it buy automobiles that have good springs and shock absorbers.

“Do – do you have to drive this way?” she finally shrilled above the clatter of the car.

“Yes. This is the best road – and that isn’t saying much,” the bespectacled driver declared.

“No! I mean so fa-a-ast!”

“Oh! Does it jar you? I’ll pull her down. Got so used to getting over all the ground I can before I break something – or a shell comes – ”

He reduced speed until they could talk to each other. Ruth learned all in one gush, it seemed, that his name was Charlie Bragg, that he had been on furlough, and that they had given him a “new second-hand flivver” to take up to Clair and beyond, as his old machine had been quite worn out.

He claimed unsmilingly to be more than twenty-one, that he had left a Western college in the middle of his freshman year to come over to drive a Red Cross car, and that he was writing a book to be called “On the Battlefront with a Flivver,” in which his brother in New York already had a publisher interested.

“Gee!” said this boy-man, who simply amazed Ruth Fielding, “Bob’s ten years older than I am, and he’s married, and his wife makes him put on rubbers and take an umbrella if it rains when he starts for his office. And they used to call me ‘Bubby’ before I came over here.”

Ruth could appreciate that! She laughed and they became better friends.

CHAPTER XV – NEW WORK

The prefect of police at Lyse was quite right. Clair was within sound of the big guns. Indeed, Ruth became aware of their steady monotone long before the rattling car reached its destination.

As the first hour sped by and the muttering of the guns came nearer and nearer, the girl asked Charlie Bragg if there was danger of one of the projectiles, that she began faintly to hear explode individually, coming their way. Was not this road a perilous one?

“Oh, no, ma’am!” he declared. “Oh, yes, this road has been bombarded more than once. Don’t you notice how crooked it is? We turn out for the shell holes and make a new road, that’s all. But there’s no danger.”

“But aren’t you frightened at all – ever?” murmured the girl of the Red Mill.

“What is there to be afraid of?” asked the boy, whom his family called “Bubby.” “If they get you they get you, and that’s all there is to it.

“We have to stop here and put the lights out,” he added, seeing a gaunt post beside the road on which was a half-obliterated sign.

“If you have to do that it must be perilous,” declared Ruth.

“No. It’s just an order. Maybe they’ve forgotten to take the sign down. But I don’t want to be stopped by one of these old territorials – or even by one of our own military police. You don’t know when you’re likely to run into one of them. Or maybe it’s a marine. Those are the boys, believe me! They’re on the job first and always.”

“But this time you boys who came to France to run automobiles got ahead of even the marine corps,” laughed Ruth. “Oh! What’s that?”

They were then traveling a very dark bit of road. Right across the gloomy way and just ahead of the machine something white dashed past. It seemed to cross the road in two or three great leaps and then sailed over the hedge on the left into a field.

“Did you see it?” asked Charlie Bragg, and there was a queer shake in his voice.

“Why, what is it? There it goes – all white!” and the excited girl pointed across the field, half standing up in the rocking car to do so.

“Going for the lines,” said the young driver.

“Is it a dog? A big dog? And he didn’t bark or anything!”

“Never does bark,” said her companion. “They say they can’t bark.”

“Then it’s a wolf! Wolves don’t bark,” Ruth suggested.

“I guess that’s right. They say they are dumb. Gosh! I don’t know,” Charlie said. “You didn’t really see anything, did you?” and he said it so very oddly that Ruth Fielding was perfectly amazed.

“What do you mean by that?” she demanded. “I saw just as much as you did.”

“Well, I’m not sure that I saw anything,” he told her slowly. “The French say it’s the werwolf – and that means just nothing at all.”

“Goodness!” exclaimed Ruth, repeating the word. “What old-world superstition is that? The ghost of a wolf?”

“They have a story that certain people, selling themselves to the Devil, can change at will into the form of a wolf,” went on Charlie.

“Oh, I know! They have that legend in every language there is, I guess,” Ruth returned.

“Now you’ve said it!”

“How ridiculous that sounds – in this day and generation. You don’t mean that people around here believe such stories?”

“They do.”

“And you half believe it yourself, Mr. Bragg,” cried Ruth, laughing.

“I tell you what it is,” the young fellow said earnestly, while still guiding the car through the dark way with a skill that was really wonderful. “There are a whole lot of things I don’t know in this world. I didn’t used to think so; but I do now.”

“But you don’t believe in magic – either black or white?”

“I know that that thing you saw just now – and that I have seen twice before – flies through this country just like that, and at night. It never makes a sound. Soldiers have shot at it, and either missed – or their bullets go right through it.”

“Oh, how absurd!”

“Isn’t it?” and perhaps Charlie Bragg grinned. But he went on seriously enough: “I don’t know. I’m only telling you what they say. If it is a white or gray dog, it leaps the very trenches and barbed-wire entanglements on the front – so they say. It has been seen doing so. No one has been able to shoot it. It crosses what they call No Man’s Land between the two battlefronts.”

“It carries despatches to the Germans, then!” cried Ruth.

“That is what the military authorities say,” said Charlie. “But these peasants don’t believe that. They say the werwolf was here long before the war. There is a chateau over back here – not far from the outskirts of Clair. The people say that the woman lives there.”

“What do you mean – the woman?” asked Ruth, between jounces, as the car took a particularly rough piece of the road on high gear.

“The one who is the werwolf,” said Charlie, and he tried to laugh.

“Mr. Bragg!”

“Well, I’m only telling you what they say,” he explained. “Lots of funny things are happening in this war. But this began before August, nineteen-fourteen, according to their tell.”

“Whose tell? And what other ‘funny’ things do you believe have happened?” the girl asked, with some scorn.

“That’s all right,” he declared more stoutly. “When you’ve been here as long as I have you’ll begin to wonder if there isn’t something in all these things you hear tell of. Why, don’t you know that fifty per cent, at least, of the French people – poilus and all – believe that the spirit of Joan of Arc led them to victory against the Boches in the worst battle of all?”

“I have heard something of that,” Ruth admitted quietly. “But that does not make me believe in werwolves.”

“No. But you should hear old Gaston Pere tell about this dog, or wolf, or ghost, or whatever it is. Gaston keeps the toll-bridge just this side of Clair. You’ll likely see him to-night. He told me all about the woman.”

“For pity’s sake, Mr. Bragg!” gasped Ruth. “Tell me more. You have got my feelings all harrowed up. You can’t possibly believe in such things – not really?”

“I’m only saying what Gaston – and others – say. This woman is a very great lady. A countess. She is an Alsatian – but not the right kind.”

“What do you mean by that?” interrupted Ruth.

“All Alsatians are not French at heart,” said the young man. “This French count married her years ago. She has two sons and both are in the French army. But it is said that she has had influence enough to keep them off the battle front.

“Oh, it sounds queer, and crazy, and all!” he added, with sudden vehemence. “But you saw that white thing flashing by yourself. It is never seen save at night, and always coming or going between the chateau and the battle lines, or between the lines themselves – out there in No Man’s Land.

“It used to race the country roads in the same direction – only as far as the then frontier – before the war. So they say. Months before the Germans spilled over into this country. There you have it.

“The military authorities believe it is a despatch-carrying dog. The peasants say the old countess is a werwolf. She keeps herself shut in the chateau with only a few servants. The military authorities can get nothing on her, and the peasants cross themselves when they pass her gate.”

Ruth said nothing for a minute or two. The guns grew louder in her ears, and the car came down a slight hill to the edge of a river. Here was the toll-bridge, and an old man came out with a shrouded lantern to take toll – and to look at their papers, too, for he was an official.

“Good evening, Gaston,” said Charlie Bragg.

“Evening, Monsieur,” was the cheerful reply.

The American lad stooped over his wheel to whisper: “Gaston! the werwolf just crossed the road three miles or so back, going toward – ” and he nodded in the direction of the grumbling guns.

“Ma foi!” exclaimed the old man. “It forecasts another bombardment or air attack. Ah-h! La-la!”

He sighed, nodded to Ruth, and stepped back to let the car go on. The girl felt as though she were growing superstitious herself. This surely was a new and strange world she had come to – and a new and strange experience.

“Do you really believe all that?” she finally asked Charlie Bragg, point-blank.

“I tell you I don’t know what I believe,” he said. “But you saw the werwolf as well as I. Now, didn’t you?”

“I saw a light-colored dog of large size that ran across the track we were following,” said Ruth Fielding decisively, almost fiercely. “I’ll confess to nothing else.”

But she liked Charlie Bragg just the same, and thanked him warmly when he set her down at the door of the Clair Hospital just before midnight. He was going on to the ambulance station, several miles nearer to the actual front.

There were no street lights in Clair and the windows of the hospital were all shrouded, as well as those of the dwellings left standing in the town. Airplanes of the enemy had taken to bombing hospitals in the work of “frightfulness.”

Ruth was welcomed by a kindly Frenchwoman, who was matron, or directrice, and shown to a cell where she could sleep. Her duties began the next morning, and it was not long before the girl of the Red Mill was deeply engaged in this new work – so deeply engaged, indeed, that she almost forgot her suspicions about the woman in black, and Legrand and José, or whatever their real names were.

However, Charlie Bragg’s story of the werwolf, of the suspected countess in her chateau behind Clair, and Gaston’s prophecy regarding the meaning of the ghostly appearance, were not easily forgotten. Especially, when, two nights following Ruth’s coming to the hospital, a German airman dropped several bombs near the institution. Evidently he was trying to get the range of the Red Cross hospital.

CHAPTER XVI – THE DAYS ROLL BY

Ruth Fielding had already become inured to the sights and sounds of hospital life at Lyse, and to its work as well. Of course she was not under the physical strain that the Red Cross nurses endured; but her heart was racked by sympathy for the blessés as greatly as the nurses’ own.

Starting without knowing anyone in the big hospital, she quickly learned her duties, and soon showed, too, her fitness for the special work assigned her. Her responsibilities merely included the arranging of special supplies and keeping the key of her supply room; but the particular strain attending her work was connected with the spiritual needs of the wounded.

Their gratitude, she soon found, was a thing to touch and warm the heart. Fretful they might be, and as unreasonable as children at times. But in the last count they were all – even the hardest of them – grateful for what she could do for them.

She had read (who has not?) of the noble sacrifices of that great woman whose work for the helpless soldiers in hospital antedates the Red Cross and its devoted workers – Florence Nightingale. She knew how the sick and dying soldiers in the Crimea kissed her shadow on their pillows as she passed their cots, and blessed her with their dying breaths.

The roughest soldier, wounded unto death, turns to the thought of mother, of wife, of sweetheart, of sister – indeed, turns to any good woman whose voice soothes him, whose hand cools the fever of his brow.

Ruth Fielding began to understand better than ever before this particular work that she was now called upon to perform, and that she was so well fitted to perform.

She was cheerful as well as sympathetic; she was sane beyond most young girls in her management of men – many men.

“Bless you, Mademoiselle!” declared the matron, “of course they will make love to you. Let them. It will do them good – the poor blessés– and do you no harm. And you have a way with you!”

Ruth got over being worried by amatory bouts with the wounded poilus after a while. Her best escape was to offer to write letters to the afflicted one’s wife or sweetheart. That was part of her work – to attend to as much of the correspondence of the helplessly wounded as possible.

And all the time she gave sympathy and care to these strangers she hoped, if Tom Cameron should chance to be wounded, some woman would be as kind to him!

She had not received a second letter from Tom; but after a fortnight Mr. Cameron and Helen came unexpectedly to Clair. Helen spent two days with her while Mr. Cameron attended to some important business connected with his mission in France.

They had seen Tom lately, and reported that the boy had advanced splendidly in his work. Mr. Cameron declared proudly that his son was a born soldier.

He had already been in the trenches held by both the French and British to study their methods of defence and offence. This training all the junior, as well as senior, officers of the American expeditionary forces were having, for this was an altogether new warfare that was being waged on the shell-swept fields of France and Belgium.

Helen had arranged to remain in Paris with Jennie Stone when her father went back to the States. She expressed herself as rather horrified at some of the things she learned Ruth did for and endured from the wounded men.

“Why, they are not at all nice – some of them,” she objected with a shudder. “That great, black-whiskered man almost swore in French just now.”

“Jean?” laughed Ruth. “I presume he did. He has terrible wounds, and when they are dressed he lies with clenched hands and never utters a groan. But when a man does that, keeping subdued the natural outlet of pain through groans and tears, his heart must of necessity, Helen, become bitter. His irritation spurts forth like the rain, upon the unjust and the just – upon the guilty and innocent alike.”

“But he should consider what you are doing for him – how you step out of your life down into his – ”

“Up into his, say, rather,” Ruth interrupted, flushing warmly. “It is true he of the black beard whom you are taking exception to, is a carter by trade. But next to him lies a count, and those two are brothers. Ah, these Frenchmen in this trial of their patriotism are wonderful, Helen!”

“Some of them are very dirty, unpleasant men,” sighed Helen, shaking her head.

“You must not speak that way of my children. Sometimes I feel jealous of the nurses,” said Ruth, smiling sadly, “because they can do so much more for them than I. But I can supply them with some comforts which the nurses cannot.”

They were, indeed, like children, these wounded, for the most part. They called Ruth “sister” in their tenderest moments; even “maman” when they were delirious. The touch of her hand often quieted them when they were feverish. She read to them when she could. And she wrote innumerable letters – intimate, family letters that these wounded men would have shrunk from having their mates know about.

Ruth, too, had to share in all the “news from home” that came to the more fortunate patients. She unpacked the boxes sent them, and took care of such contents as were not at once gobbled down – for soldiers are inordinately fond of “goodies.” She had to obey strictly the doctors’ orders about these articles of diet, however, or some of the patients would have failed to progress in their convalescence.

Nor were all on the road to recovery; yet the spirit of cheerfulness was the general tone of even the “dangerous” cases. Their unshaken belief was that they would get well and, many of them, return to their families again.

“Chère petite mère,” Louis, the little Paris tailor, shot through both lungs, whispered to Ruth as she passed his bed, “see! I have something to show you. It came to me only to-day in the mail. Our first – and born since I came away. The very picture of his mother!”

The girl looked, with sympathetic eyes, at the postcard photograph of a very bald baby. Her ability to share in their joys and sorrows made her work here of much value.

“I feel now,” said Louis softly, “that le bon Dieu will surely let me live – I shall live to see the child,” and he said it with exalted confidence.

But Ruth had already heard the head physician of the hospital whisper to the nurse that Louis had no more than twenty-four hours to live. Yet the poilu’s sublime belief kept him cheerful to the end.

Many, many things the girl of the Red Mill was learning these days. If they did not exactly age her, she felt that she could never again take life so thoughtlessly and lightly. Her girlhood was behind her; she was facing the verities of existence.

CHAPTER XVII – AT THE GATEWAY OF THE CHATEAU

Ruth heard from Clare Biggars and the other girls at the Lyse Hospital on several occasions; but little was said in any of their letters regarding Mrs. Mantel, and, of course, nothing at all of the woman’s two friends, who Ruth had reason to suspect were dishonest.

She wondered if the prefect of police had looked up the records of “Professor Perry” and the Italian commissioner, the latter who, she was quite sure, could be identified as “Signor Aristo,” the chef, and again as “José,” who had worked for the Red Cross at Robinsburg.

France was infested, she understood, with spies. It was whispered that, from highest to lowest, all grades of society were poisoned by the presence of German agents.

Whether Rose Mantel and her two friends were actually working for the enemy or not, Ruth was quite sure they were not whole-heartedly engaged in efforts for the Red Cross, or for France.

However, her heart and hands were so filled with hourly duties that Ruth could not give much thought to the unsavory trio. Rose Mantel, the woman in black, and the two men Ruth feared and suspected, must be attended to by the proper authorities. The girl of the Red Mill had done quite all that could be expected of her when she warned the police head at Lyse to be on his guard.