Page:Ruth of the U.S.A. (IA ruthofusa00balm).pdf/129

 tion that nothing she could do could save her had amazingly freed her from fear.

Fear, then, was not made up just of a dread of death. Now that the Ribot was safely in from the Bay of Biscay, had passed the Phare de Cordouan and was running down the broad, flat estuary of the Gironde river to Bordeaux, securely situated sixty long miles inland, Ruth was in no danger of death at all. If at that city, whose roofs and chimneys were just coming into sight, the French examiners found out how she had obtained her passport, how she had duped and tricked people to aid her in arriving here, and if they arrested her, therefore, upon the charge of being a German spy, they would be making her life safe; her punishment probably would not go beyond imprisonment for the duration of the war; it would prevent her wild plan of going into Germany, where court-martials did not simply imprison spies. Yet Ruth was afraid this morning as she had never been before; far, far more afraid than when she had been in battle.

That meant, obviously, that she was far more afraid of failing to do that which she was determined upon than she was afraid of dying. Less than three weeks earlier, when Ruth Alden was drawing up quit-claims and deeds for Sam Hilton in Chicago, such a recognition of the fact in regard to oneself would have seemed—even if spoken only to self—ostentatious and theatrical; but now to make the fate of yourself nothing, the performing of your part in the great scheme everything, was the simple and accepted code of almost everyone about her.

Exactly when Ruth had begun to accept this code for herself, she did not know. Once or twice in her twenty-two