Page:Ruth of the U.S.A. (IA ruthofusa00balm).pdf/307

 of that most essential information which she had intercepted, and loss to the allies of the knowledge of German plans.

She opened the drawer which Adler had just closed and she took out the sheets of von Forstner's reports and the stencils. She went out into the hall and, finding it empty, she passed quickly to a door on the side of the house which, she believed, was not commanded from the windows of the room where Captain von Forstner's body lay. In that direction, also, the forest lay nearer to the house; Ruth went out and walked toward the trees. An impulse to run almost controlled her, but she realized that she must be in sight of servants, who might not question her strolling out away from the house in the warm spring sunshine but who would immediately report anything which resembled flight. So she went slowly until she reached the forest; then she ran—wildly and breathlessly.

She found a path, well marked and much used and easy to run upon. Other paths, almost overgrown, opened into it here and there. Ruth ran by the first few of these; then, choosing arbitrarily, she took one of the disused ways which twisted north—she noticed—through denser thickets of budding oaks and beeches; it ascended, too, bending back and forth up a mountainside which brought the darker boughs of the black firs drooping about her while, underfoot, the ground alternately became stony bare and soft with velvety cushions of pine needles.

She stopped at last, exhausted and gasping; her pulses were pounding so in her head that she scarcely could hear, and the forest on every side limited sight. But so far as she could see and as well as she could hear there was no