Page:Ruth of the U.S.A. (IA ruthofusa00balm).pdf/312

 captured by von Forstner—she recognized that she would be shot. Therefore her recapture with von Forstner's reports upon her could not make her fate worse; and in any case she determined to preserve them as proof to the French—if she ever regained access to the French—that the information which she bore was authentic. She did up the papers and the stencils together and secreted them under her clothing.

She tried to imagine what Adler and Oberst-Lieutenant von Fallenbosch—who undoubtedly was now saying to Adler a good deal more than the secretary had dreaded—would expect her to do so that she could choose the opposite course. The alternatives, obviously, were effort to reach the Swiss frontier and in some way elude the border guards or to make for the Alsace front, where the French and the Americans were fighting.

This second allured her powerfully; but, to attempt it, meant leaving this friendly cover of the Black Forest—which would hide her almost to the Swiss frontier—and crossing west to the Rhine and across to the Rhine Canal, and almost the whole way across Alsace to the Vosges Mountains, where the opposing trenches twisted. She knew that behind the German fighting front she would encounter a military zone of many miles, much more difficult to penetrate than the civilian zone bounding the soldier-sentineled barriers at the Swiss frontier. But, just beyond that zone in Alsace lay American battalions; above it would be flying American battleplanes.

Ruth closed her eyes and seemed to see them; one was fighting as she had seen Gerry Hull fight that morning near Mirevaux. It was he and he was being shot down!