Page:Ruth of the U.S.A. (IA ruthofusa00balm).pdf/320

 always she learned the futility of attempting to proccedproceed [sic] alone.

She was following her sixth guide after Fayal, and it was upon the eleventh evening after her escape from Lauengratz, when suddenly she heard a rough challenge; German soldiers appeared across the path; others leaped up from the right and left; yet others were behind.

Her guide instantly recognized that he had led her into a trap; and he fought, wildly, to try to save her. She fought, too. But they bayoneted him, and, upon their bayonets, they bore him back upon her. A soldier seized her; overpowered her, brutally, and she struggled no longer with hope to fight free, but only to destroy the papers which she still carried. So they pinioned her arms; they half stripped her in searching her; they took her papers, and leaving her guide dead upon the ground, they hurried her with them to their commandant.

This officer instantly suspected her identity. For, in spite of her eleven nights of flight, she was not yet seventy miles from Lauengratz. Disposition of her evidently had been predetermined, pending her recapture; for the officer, after examining her again, dispatched her to a railroad train, under guard. They put her in manacles and, boarding a north-bound train, they took her to a town the name of which she could not learn. From the station they marched her to what appeared to be an old castle, where they at once confined her, alone, in a stone-walled cell.

It possessed a solitary, narrow slit of a window, high up under the ceiling; it boasted for furniture a cot, a chair and bowls. The Germans relieved her of the