Page:Ruth of the U.S.A. (IA ruthofusa00balm).pdf/265

 recent; it seemed to come, somehow, only to a girl who lay awake early in the morning in a shabby room at an Ontario Street boarding house, a girl who day-dreamed about impossible happenings such as knowing Gerry Hull, but who soon must stir to go down to breakfast at the disorderly table in the ill-lit room below and then catch a crowded car for Sam Hilton's office.

Such was the work of peace and Pilatus and the Rigi and the images upon the lake. War—war which had become the only reality, the sole basis of being—miraculously had vanished. She passed through throngs speaking German and by other groups conversing in French; these stood side by side, neither one prisoner to the other; they had no apparent hostility or animosity. These people, in part at least, were German and French; but there beyond the border—Ruth gazed in the direction of Alsace—men of such sorts sprang at one another with bayonets; and Gerry Hull had been shot down.

Ruth searched the German newspaper for further word of him; she looked up a news-stand and bought several papers, both French and German. In some she discovered the same brief announcement of the fate of the American pilot; but no further information. But it was certain that he was dead or a prisoner—wounded, probably, or at least injured by the crash of his airplane in the "some sort of a landing" which he had succeeded in making. It had been "some sort of a landing" which he had made that time he was shot down when she had gone to him and helped him free. Tales of German treatment of their prisoners—tales which she could not doubt, having been told her by men who themselves had suffered