CHAPTER XX--MANY THINGS HAPPEN

Ruth reached the farmhouse just as the family was sitting down to breakfast. The house and outbuildings of the Dupays were all connected, as is the way in this part of France. No shell had fallen near the buildings, which was very fortunate, indeed.

Henriette's father was a one-armed man. He had lost his left arm at the Marne, and had been honorably discharged, to go back to farming, in order to try to raise food for the army and for the suffering people of France. His two sons and his brothers were still away at the wars, so every child big enough to help, and the women of the family as well, aided in the farm work.

No petrol could be used to drive cars for pleasure; but Henriette sometimes had to go for supplies, or to carry things to market, or do other errands connected with the farm work. Ruth hoped that the French girl would be allowed to help her.

The hospitable Dupays insisted upon the American girl's sitting down to table with them. She was given a seat on the bench between Henriette and Jean, a lad of four, who looked shyly up at the visitor from under heavy brown lashes, and only played with his food.

It was not the usual French breakfast to which Ruth Fielding had become accustomed--coffee and bread, with possibly a little compote, or an egg. There was meat on the table--a heavy meal, for it was to be followed by long hours of heavy labor.

"What brings you out so early after this awful night?" Henriette whispered to her visitor.

Ruth told her. She could eat but little, she was so anxious about Tom Cameron. She made it plain to the interested French girl just why she so desired to follow on to Lyse and learn if it really was Tom who had been wounded, as the message on the blood-stained envelope said.

"I might start along the road and trust to some ambulance overtaking me," Ruth explained. "But often there is a wounded man who can sit up riding on the seat with the driver--sometimes two. I could not take the place of such an unfortunate."

"It would be much too far for you to walk, Mademoiselle," said the mother, overhearing. "We can surely help you."

She spoke to her husband--a huge man, of whom Ruth stood rather in awe, he was so stern-looking and taciturn. But Henriette said he had been a "laughing man" before his experience in the war. War had changed many people, this French girl said, nodding her head wisely.

"The venerable Countess Marchand," pointing to the chateau on the hill, "had been neighborly and kind until the war came. Now she shut herself away from all the neighbors, and if a body went to the chateau it was only to be confronted by old Bessie, who was the countess' housekeeper, and her only personal servant now."

"Old Bessie," Ruth judged, must be the hard-featured woman she had seen at the chateau gate and, on this particular morning, talking to the lame man at the wayside cross.

The American girl waited now in some trepidation for Dupay to speak. He seemed to consider the question of Ruth's getting to Lyse quite seriously for some time; then he said quietly that he saw no objection to Henriette taking the sacks of grain to M. Naubeck in the touring car body instead of the truck, and going to-day to Lyse on that errand instead of the next week.

It was settled so easily. Henriette ran away to dress, while a younger brother slipped out to see that the car was in order for the two girls. Ruth knew she could not offer the Dupays any remuneration for the trouble they took for her, but she was so thankful to them that she was almost in tears when she and Henriette started for Lyse half an hour later.

"The main road is so cut up and rutted by the big lorries and ambulances that we would better go another way," Henriette said, as she steered out of the farm lane into the wider road.

They turned away from Lyse, it seemed to Ruth; but, after circling around the hill on which the chateau stood, they entered a more traveled way, but one not so deeply rutted.

A mile beyond this point, and just as the motor-car came down a gentle slope to a small stream, crossed by a rustic bridge, the two girls spied another automobile, likewise headed toward Lyse. It was stalled, both wheels on the one side being deep in a muddy rut.

There were two men with the car--a small man and a much taller individual, who was dressed in the uniform of a French officer--a captain, as Ruth saw when they came nearer.

The little man stepped into the woods, perhaps for a sapling, with which to pry up the car, before the girls reached the bottom of the hill. At least, they only saw his back. But when Ruth gained a clear view of the officer's face she was quite shocked.

"What is the matter?" Henriette asked her, driving carefully past the stalled car.

Ruth remained silent until they were across the bridge and the French girl had asked her question a second time, saying:

"What is it, Mademoiselle Ruth?"

"Do you know that man?" Ruth returned, proving herself a true Yankee by answering one question with another.

"The captain? No. I do not know him. There are many captains," and Henriette laughed.

"He--he looks like somebody I know," Ruth said hesitatingly. She did not wish to explain her sudden shocked feeling on seeing the man's face. He looked like the shaven Legrand who, on the ship coming over and in Lyse, had called himself "Professor Perry."

If this was the crook, who, Ruth believed, had set fire to the business office of the Robinsburg Red Cross headquarters, he had evidently not been arrested in connection with the supply department scandal, of which the matron of the hospital had told her. At least, he was now free. And the little fellow with him! Had not Ruth, less than two hours before, seen José talking with the woman from the chateau at the wayside shrine near Clair?

The mysteries of these two men and their disguises troubled Ruth Fielding vastly. It seemed that the prefect of police at Lyse had not apprehended them. Nor was Mrs. Mantel yet in the toils.

This was a longer way to Lyse by a number of miles than the main road; nevertheless, it was probable that the girls gained time by following the more roundabout route.

It was not yet noon when Henriette stopped at a side entrance to the hospital where Ruth had served her first few weeks for the Red Cross in France. The girl of the Red Mill sprang out, and, asking her friend to wait for her, ran into the building.

The guard remembered her, and nobody stopped her on the way to the reception office, where a record was kept of all the patients in the great building. The girl at the desk was a stranger to Ruth, but she answered the visitor's questions as best she could.

She looked over the records of the wounded accepted from the battle front or from evacuation hospitals during the past forty-eight hours. There was no such name as Cameron on the list; and, as far as the clerk knew, no American at all among the number.

"Oh, there _must_ be!" gasped Ruth, wringing her hands. "Surely there is a mistake. There is no other hospital here for him to be brought to, and I am sure this person was brought to Lyse. They say his arm is torn off at the elbow."

A nurse passing through the office stopped and inquired in French of whom Ruth was speaking. The girl of the Red Mill explained.

"I believe we have the _blessé_ in my ward," this nurse said kindly. "Will you come and see, Mademoiselle? He has been quite out of his head, and perhaps he is an American, for he has not spoken French. We thought him English."

"Oh, let me see him!" cried Ruth, and hastened with her into one of the wards where she knew the most serious cases were cared for.

Her fears almost overcame the girl. Her interest in Tom Cameron was deep and abiding. For years they had been friends, and now, of late, a stronger feeling than friendship had developed in her heart for Tom.

His courage, his cheerfulness, the real, solid worth of the young fellow, could not fail to endear him to one who knew him as well as did Ruth Fielding. If he had been shot down, mangled, injured, perhaps, to the very death!

How would Helen and their father feel if Tom was seriously wounded? If Ruth found him here in the hospital, should she immediately communicate with his twin sister in Paris, and with his father, who had doubtless reached the States by this time?

Her mind thus in a turmoil, she followed the nurse into the ward and down the aisle between the rows of cots. She had helped comfort the wounded in this very ward when she worked in this hospital; but she looked now for no familiar face, save one. She looked ahead for the white, strained countenance of Tom Cameron against the coarse pillow-slip.

The nurse stopped beside a cot. Oh, the relief! There was no screen around it! The occupant was turned with his face away from the aisle. The stump of the uplifted arm on his left side, bandaged and padded, was uppermost.

"Tom!" breathed the girl of the Red Mill, holding back just a little and with a hand upon her breast.

It was a head of black hair upon the pillow. It might easily have been Tom Cameron. And in a moment Ruth was sure that he was an American from the very contour of his visage--but it was _not_ Tom!

"Oh! It's not! It's not!" she kept saying over and over to herself. And then she suddenly found herself sitting in a chair at the end of the ward and the nurse was saying to her:

"Are you about to faint, Mademoiselle? It is the friend you look for?"

"Oh, no! I sha'n't faint," Ruth declared, getting a grip upon her nerves again. "It is not my friend. Oh! I cannot tell you how relieved I am."

"Ah, yes! I know," sighed the Frenchwoman. "I have a father and a brother in our army and after every battle I fear until I hear from them. I am glad for your sake it is another than your friend. And yet--_he_ will have friends who suffer, too--is it not?"