Page:Ruth of the U.S.A. (IA ruthofusa00balm).pdf/356

 his words, but they were separate sort of words without meaning. He and Mike were lifting her now and lowering her feet first into a pit—the seat pit of an airplane. Mike stepped down into the pit with her and supported her there. Gerry was gone from her now, but not far away. He was in the pilot's pit, or just behind it, with the pilot in front of him. The motor was roaring again; the machine was moving; it was rising. She was flying!

Far—far below, when she looked back, she saw a strange sheen, which was the moonlight on the ground, with a twisting, brighter strip dividing it.

"That," she tried to say to the man holding her in his lap, "that's the Rhine?"

He tried very hard to hear her, and she supposed that the same thing must be the matter with him as was the trouble with her when Gerry spoke to her on the ground. Only slowly she realized that she could not even hear her own voice for the noise of the motor.

She looked back to the other pit and saw Gerry's face; he waved at her and she waved back; then she sank upon the shoulder of the man holding her, and she lost consciousness.

Many times while that English bombing biplane—weighted now by three men and a girl instead of by two men and bombs—made the journey to the allied lines, Ruth stirred to semi-wakefulness. The swaying and the rising and the falling of the airplane as it rode the currents of the air made it seem to Ruth that she was upon a ship at sea—upon the Ribot. At other times the motion seemed merely the buoyancy following the sinking of sensations in a dream. Afterwards she remembered sitting