Until the hour the party left New York for Philadelphia, the port of sail for the Red Cross ship, no candidate had been settled on by the Commissioner to head the supply unit.
"We shall find somebody. I have one person in mind right now who may be the very one. If so, this person will be shipped by a faster vessel and by another convoy than yours," and he laughed. "You may find your chief in Paris when you get there."
Ruth wondered to herself if they really would get there. At this time the German submarines were sinking even the steamships taking Red Cross workers and supplies across. The Huns had thrown over their last vestige of humanity.
The ship which carried the Red Cross units joined a squadron of other supply ships outside Cape May. The guard ships were a number of busy and fast sailing torpedo boat destroyers. They darted around the slower flotilla of merchant steamships like "lucky-bugs" on a millpond.
Ruth shared her outside cabin with a girl from Topeka, Kansas-an exceedingly blithe and boisterous young person.
"I never imagined there was so much water in the ocean!" declared this young woman, Clare Biggars. "Look at it! Such a perfectly awful waste of it. If the ocean is just a means of communication between countries, it needn"t be any wider than the Missouri River, need it?"
"I am glad the Atlantic is a good deal wider than that," Ruth said seriously. "The Kaiser and his armies would have been over in our country before this in that case."
Clare chuckled. "Lots of the farming people in my section are Germans, and three months ago they noised it abroad that New York had been attacked by submarines and flying machines and that a big army of their fellow-countrymen were landing in this country at a place called Montauk Point--"
"The end of Long Island," interposed Ruth.
"And were going to march inland and conquer the country as they marched.
They would do to New York State just what they have done to Belgium and Northern France. It was thought, by their talk, that all the Germans around Topeka would rise and seize the banks and a.r.s.enals and all."
"Why didn"t they?" asked Ruth, much amused.
"Why," said Clare, laughing, too, "the police wouldn"t let them."
The German peril by sea, however, was not to be sneered at. As the fleet approached the coast of France it became evident that the officers of the Red Cross ship, as well as those of the convoy, were in much anxiety.
There seems no better way to safeguard the merchant ships than for the destroyers to sail ahead and "clear the way" for the unarmored vessels.
But a sharp submarine commander may spy the coming flotilla through his periscope, sink deep to allow the destroyers to pa.s.s over him, and then rise to the surface between the destroyers and the larger ships and torpedo the latter before the naval vessels can attack the subsea boat.
For forty-eight hours none of the girls of the Red Cross supply unit had their clothing off or went to bed. They were advised to buckle on life preservers, and most of them remained on deck, watching for submarines.
It was scarcely possible to get them below for meals.
The strain of the situation was great. And yet it was more excitement over the possibility of being attacked than actual fear.
"What"s the use of going across the pond at such a time if we"re not even to see a periscope?" demanded Clare. "My brother, Ben, who is coming over with the first expedition of the National Army, wagered me ten dollars I wouldn"t know a periscope if I saw one. I"d like to earn that ten. Every little bit adds to what you"ve got, you know."
It was not the sight of a submarine periscope that startled Ruth Fielding the evening of the next-to-the-last day of the voyage. It was something she heard as she leaned upon the port rail on the main deck, quite alone, looking off across the graying water.
Two people were behind her, and out of sight around the corner of the deckhouse. One was a man, with a voice that had a compelling bark.
Whether his companion was a man or a woman Ruth could not tell. But the voice she heard so distinctly began to rasp her nerves-and its familiarity troubled her, too.
Now and then she heard a word in English. Then, of a sudden, the man e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed in German:
"The foolish ones! As though this boat would be torpedoed with us aboard! These Americans are crazy."
Ruth wheeled and walked quickly down the deck to the corner of the house. She saw the speaker sitting in a deck chair beside another person who was so wrapped in deck rugs that she could not distinguish what he or she looked like.
But the silhouette of the man who had uttered those last words stood out plainly between Ruth and the fading light. He was tall, with heavy shoulders, and a fat, beefy face. That smoothly shaven countenance looked like n.o.body that she had ever seen before; but the barking voice sounded exactly like that of Legrand, Mrs. Rose Mantel"s a.s.sociate and particular friend!
CHAPTER XII-THROUGH DANGEROUS WATERS
There were a number of people aboard ship whom Ruth Fielding had not met, of course; some whom she had not even seen. And this was not to be wondered at, for the feminine members of the supply unit were grouped together in a certain series of staterooms; and they even had their meals in a second cabin saloon away from the hospital units.
She looked, for some moments, at the huge shoulders of the man who had spoken in German, hoping he would turn to face her. She had not observed him since coming aboard the ship at Philadelphia.
It seemed scarcely possible that this could be Legrand, the man who she had come to believe was actually responsible for the fire in the Robinsburg Red Cross rooms. If he was a traitor to the organization-and to the United States as well-how dared he sail on this ship for France, and with an organization of people who were sworn to work for the Red Cross?
Was he sufficiently disguised by the shaving of his beard to risk discovery? And with that peculiar, sharp, barking voice! "A Prussian drill master surely could be no more abrupt," thought Ruth.
As the ship in these dangerous waters sailed with few lamps burning, and none at all had been turned on upon the main deck, it was too dark for Ruth to see clearly either the man who had spoken or the person hidden by the wraps in the deck chair.
She saw the spotlight in the hand of an officer up the deck and she hastened toward him. The pa.s.sengers were warned not to use the little electric hand lamps outside of the cabins and pa.s.sages. She was not mistaken in the ident.i.ty of this person with the lamp. It was the purser.
"Oh, Mr. Savage!" she said. "Will you walk with me?"
"Bless me, Miss Fielding! you fill me with delight. This is an unexpected proposal I am sure," he declared in his heavy, English, but good-humored way.
""Fash not yoursel" wi" pride," as Chief Engineer Douglas would say,"
laughed Ruth. "I am going to ask you to walk with me so that you can tell me the name of another man I am suddenly interested in."
"What! What!" cried the purser. "Who is that, I"d like to know. Who are you so suddenly interested in?"
She tried to explain the appearance of the round-shouldered man as she led the purser along the deck. But when they reached the spot where Ruth had left the individuals both had disappeared.
"I don"t know whom you could have seen," the purser said, "unless it was Professor Perry. His stateroom is yonder-A-thirty-four. And the little chap in the deck chair might be Signor Aristo, an Italian, who rooms next door, in thirty-six."
"I am not sure it was a man in the other chair."
"Professor Perry has nothing to do with the ladies aboard, I a.s.sure you," chuckled the purser. "A dry-as-dust old fellow, Perry, going to France for some kind of research work. Comes from one of your Western universities. I believe they have one in every large town, haven"t they?"
"One what?" Ruth asked.
"University," chuckled the Englishman. "You should get acquainted with Perry, if his appearance so much interests you, Miss Fielding."
But Ruth was in no mood for banter about the man whose appearance and words had so astonished her. She said nothing to the purser or to anybody else about what she had heard the strange man say in German. No person who belonged-really _belonged_-on this Red Cross ship, should have said what he did and in that tone!
He spoke to his companion as though there was a settled and secret understanding between them. And as though, too, he had a power of divination about what the German U-boat commanders would do, beyond the knowledge possessed by the officers of the steamship.
What could a "dry-as-dust" professor from a Western university have in common with the person known as Signor Aristo, who Ruth found was down on the ship"s list as a chef of a wealthy Fifth Avenue family, going back to his native Italy.
It was said the Signor had had a very bad pa.s.sage. He had kept to his room entirely, not even appearing on deck. _Was he a man at all?_
The thought came to Ruth Fielding and would not be put away, that this small, retiring person known as Signor Aristo might be a woman. If Professor Perry was the distinguished Legrand what was more possible than that the person Ruth had seen in the deck chair was Mrs. Rose Mantel, likewise in disguise?