Page:Ruth of the U.S.A. (IA ruthofusa00balm).pdf/185

 seeing travel upon it, Gerry took his prisoner in that direction.

He found refugees upon the road—patient, pitiful families of French peasants in flight, aiding one another and bearing poor bundles of their most precious possessions. The sight brought Gerry back to his first days of the war and to the feelings of the boy he had been in August, 1914, when he rushed across the channel from England to offer himself to the Red Cross in France and when he met the first refugees fleeing before von Klück's army out of Belgium and Normandy. He had seen nothing like this in France since then; and the years of war had not calloused him to these consequences. Indeed, they had brought to him more terrible realizations than the horror-struck boy of 1914 had been able to imagine. So these again were to be visited upon France! And because his people had watched for almost three years, had kept safely out!

His prisoner now turned to Gerry and spoke to him in French.

"It appears," he corrected the error he had made when Gerry had taken him, "that you are not my prisoner yet."

"No," Gerry said. "Not yet."

A Ford truck passed the farm wains and the miserable column of marchers. The driver, Gerry saw, was in khaki and was a girl. She observed him and drew up.

"Hello," she hailed alertly, taking in the situation at a glance. "Do you want to get rid of your prisoner?"

She was American—one of those "awfully good" girls of whom the English had told him! And, seeing her and hearing her voice, he knew what the English pilot