Page:Ruth of the U.S.A. (IA ruthofusa00balm).pdf/293

 with muscles bruised and strained; but she had escaped without broken bones or disabling injury. A German soldier, armed with a rifle, joined the group of Russians about Ruth. Evidently he was a guard who had been at some distance when the car went from the road.

"You are much injured, gnädiges Fräulein?" the soldier asked her solicitously and respectfully.

"Only a little," Ruth replied, collecting strength again and regaining clearness of thought.

When the Russians first had come to her aid she had thought of them as helping her, as an American against the Germans; but now she was cool enough to realize how absurd that idea was. These peasant slaves were not moved by any political emotions and, if they had been, they were incapable of recognizing her as an American and the possessor of any particular sympathy for them. She was to them a lady—a companion of a master who undoubtedly had mistreated them; but when they had found that master helpless they had been below any instincts of revenge upon him. They had considered his misfortune a lucky chance given them to perform some service which could win them favor, and now that the master was dead they sought that favor from the mistress.

And much the same considerations governed the German guard. It was plain from his manner of address to her that he could not have witnessed the accident to the car, or at least he could not have observed that she had caused it. She was to him a friend of Hauptmann von Forstner, who had passed riding beside Herr Hauptmann—a lady, of the class of persons with whom Herr Hauptmann associated and whose authority at all times and