"There must be something big going on over there. Is it a general advance, Monsieur?"
Ruth flashed him a look and laid her fingers gently on Charlie Bragg"s arm. The ambulance driver was by no means dull.
"I can"t say what is on foot," he said to the French officer. "I should think you might know more about it than I do," he added.
His engine began to rattle the somewhat infirm car. Charlie winked openly at Henriette, who laughed at him. The car began to move. Major Marchand stood beside the road and bowed profoundly again to Ruth--that bow from the hips. It was German, that bow; it proved that his military education had not been wholly gained in France.
She could not help doubting the loyalty of Major Henri Marchand as well as that of his older brother, the present count. Their mother might be the loveliest lady in the world, but there was something wrong with her sons.
Here the younger one was idling away his time about the chateau, or in Paris, so it was said, while the count had suddenly disappeared and was not to be found at all! Neither had been engaged in any dangerous work on the battle front. It was all very strange.
The bouncing ambulance was swiftly out of sight of the chateau gate.
Ruth sighed.
"Say! isn"t there anybody at all who can go with those supplies they"re in need of but you, Miss Ruth?" inquired Charlie Bragg, looking sideways at her.
"No. I am alone at Clair, you know quite well, Charlie. The supplies are entirely under my care. I can teach somebody else over there at the bombed hospital in a short time how to handle the things.
Meanwhile, the matron--or somebody else--can do my work here. It would not do to send a greenhorn to such a busy hospital as this must be to which you are taking me."
"Busy! You said it!" observed the driver. "You"ll see a lot of rough stuff, Miss Ruth; and you haven"t been used to that. What"ll Tom Cameron say?" and he grinned suddenly.
Ruth laughed a little. "Every tub must stand on its own bottom, Aunt Alvirah says. I must do my duty."
"It"ll be a mighty dangerous trip. I"m not fooling you. There are places on the road---- Well! the Boches are all stirred up and they are likely to drop a sh.e.l.l or two almost anywhere, you know."
"You came through it, didn"t you?" she demanded pluckily.
"By the skin of my teeth," he returned.
"You"re trying to scare me."
"Honest to goodness I"m not. They sent me over for the supplies and somebody to attend to them."
"Well?" she said inquiringly, as Charlie ceased to speak.
"But I didn"t think you"d have to make the trip. Isn"t there anybody else, Miss Ruth?" and the young fellow was quite earnest now.
"n.o.body," she said firmly. "No use telling me anything more, Charlie.
For the very reason the trip is dangerous, you wouldn"t want me to put it off on somebody else, would you?"
He said no more. The car rattled down into the little town, with its crooked, paved streets and its countless smells. Clair was the center of a farming community, and, in some cases, the human inhabitants and the dumb beasts lived very close together.
The hospital sprawled over considerable ground. It was but two stories in height, save at the back, where a third story was run up for the "cells" of the nurses and the other women engaged in the work. Ruth ran up at once to her own tiny room to pack her handbag before she did anything else.
The matron met her at the supply-room door when she came down. She was a voluble, if not volatile, Frenchwoman of certain age.
"I dread having you go, Mademoiselle Ruth," she said, with her arm about the girl. "I feel as though you were particularly in my care.
If anything should happen to you----"
"You surely would not be blamed," said Ruth, smiling. "Somebody must go and why not I? Please send two orderlies to carry out these boxes.
This list calls for a lot of supplies. Surely the ambulance will be filled."
Which was, indeed, the case. When she finally went downstairs, turning the key of her store-room over to the matron, the ambulance body was crowded with cases. The stretchers had been taken out before Charlie Bragg drove in. Ruth must occupy the seat beside him in front.
She did not keep him waiting, but ran down with her bag and crept in under the torn hood beside him. Several of the nurses stood in the door to call good-bye after her. The sentinel in the courtyard stood at attention as the car rolled out of the gate.
"Well," remarked Charlie Bragg, "I hope to thunder nothing busts, that"s all. You"ve never been to the front, have you?"
"No nearer than this," she confessed.
"Humph! You don"t know anything about it."
"But is the hospital you are taking me to exactly at the front?"
"About five miles behind the first dressing station in this sector.
It"s under the protection of a hill and is well camouflaged. But almost any time the Boches may get its range, and then--good-night!"
With which remark he became silent, giving his strict attention to the car and the road.
CHAPTER IV
UNDER FIRE
The day was fading into evening as the car went over the first ridge and dropped out of sight of Clair and the sprawling hospital in which Ruth Fielding had worked so many weeks.
She felt that she had grown old--and grown old rapidly--since coming to her present work in France. She was the only American in that hospital, for the United States Expeditionary Forces had only of late taken over this sector of the battle line and no changes had been made in the unity of the workers at Clair.
They all loved Ruth there, from the matron and the surgeon-in-chief down to the last orderly and porter. Although her work was supposed to be entirely in the supply department, she gave much of her time to the patients themselves.
Those who could not write, or could not read, were aided by the American girl. If there was extra work in the wards (and that happened whenever the opposing forces on the front became active) Ruth was called on to help the nurses.
Thus far no American wounded had been brought into the Clair Hospital--a fact easily understood, as the entire force save Ruth was French. It would not be long, however, before the American Red Cross would take over that hospital and the French wounded would be sent to the base hospital at Lyse, where Ruth had first worked on coming to France.
Up to this very moment--and not an unexciting moment it was--Ruth Fielding had never been so far away from Clair in this direction. In the distance, as they mounted another ridge, she saw the flaring lights which she had long since learned marked the battle front. The guns still muttered.
Now and again they pa.s.sed cavities where the great sh.e.l.ls had burst.
But most of these were ancient marmite holes and the gra.s.s was again growing in them, or water stood slimy and knee-deep, and, on the edges of these pools, frogs croaked their evensong.
There were not many farmhouses in this direction. Indeed, this part of France was "old-fashioned" in that the agricultural people lived in little villages for the most part and went daily to their fields to work, gathering at night for self-protection as they had done since feudal times.
Now and again the ambulance pa.s.sed within sight of a ruined chateau.
The Germans had left none intact when they had advanced first into this part of the country. They rolled through two tiny villages which remained merely battered heaps of ruins.
Orchards were razed; even the shade trees beside the pleasant roads had been scored with the ax and now stood gaunt and dead. Some were splintered freshly by German sh.e.l.ls. As the light faded and the road grew dim, Ruth Fielding saw many ugly objects which marked the "frightfulness" of the usurpers. It all had a depressing effect on the girl"s spirits.
"Are you hungry, Miss Ruth?" Charlie Bragg asked her at last.