Ruth Fielding at the War Front | Page 3

He--he must be a ve-ry important man, Mademoiselle, or his duty would not keep him there."
"Unless the Boches succeed in raiding Paris from the air he is not likely to get hurt at all--this Major Marchand?"
"Oh!" pouted Henriette. "You are so critical. But he is--what you say?--so-o beautiful!"
"Not in my eyes," said Ruth grimly. "I don't like dolly soldiers."
"Oh, Mademoiselle Ruth!" murmured the French girl. "Do not let Madame the Countess suspect your feelings toward her younger son. He is all she has now, you know."
"Indeed? Has the older son fallen in battle?"
"The young count has disappeared," whispered Henriette, her lips close to Ruth's ear. "We heard of it only lately. But it seems he disappeared some months ago. Nobody knows what has become of him."
"He, at least, was on the battle front?" asked the American girl. "He is missing? Probably a prisoner of the Germans?"
"No-o. He was not at the front," confessed the other girl. "He, too, was engaged in Paris, it is understood. But hush! We are at the gate. I will ring. Don't, Mademoiselle Ruth, let the dear countess suspect that you do not highly approve of her remaining son."
The Red Cross girl smiled rather grimly, but she gave the promise.
CHAPTER II
AT THE CHATEAU
The two girls, arm in arm, approached the postern gate beside the wide iron grille that was never opened save for the passage of horses or a motor car. There was a little round shutter in the postern at the height of a man's head; for aforetime the main gateway had been of massive oak, bolt-studded and impervious to anything less than cannon shot. The wall of masonry that surrounded the chateau was both high and thick, built four hundred years or so before for defence.
An old-fashioned rope-pull hung beside the postern. Henriette dragged on this sharply, but the girls could not hear the tongue of the bell, for it struck far back in the so-called offices of the chateau, where the serving people had had their quarters before these war times had come upon the earth.
Now there were but few servants remaining at the chateau. For the most part the elderly Countess Marchand lived alone and used but few of the rooms.
As the girls waited an answer to their summons, Henriette said, in reference to what had already passed in conversation between them:
"It hurts me, dear friend, that anybody should doubt the loyalty of our countess whom we know to be so good. Why! there are people even wicked enough to connect her with that--that awful Thing we know of," and the girl dropped her voice and looked suddenly around her, as though she feared an unseen presence.
"As though she were a werwolf," she added, with a shudder.
"Pooh!" and Ruth Fielding laughed. "Nobody in their senses would connect Madame la Countess with such tales, having once seen her."
She thought now, as they waited, of her first visit to the chateau, and of the appearance of the Countess Marchand in her bare library. Whatever her sons might be--the young count who was missing, or this major whom she had just met in the grassy lane--Ruth Fielding was confident that the lady of the chateau was a loyal subject of France, and that she was trusted by the Government.
Ruth had called here herself on that occasion with a secret agent, Monsieur Lafrane, to clear up the mystery of a trio of criminals who had come from America to prey upon the Red Cross. These crooks had succeeded in robbing the Supply Department of the Red Cross, in which Ruth herself was engaged. But in the end they had fallen into the toils of the French secret service and Ruth had aided in their overthrow.
All this is told in the volume of this series immediately preceding our present story, entitled: "Ruth Fielding in the Red Cross; or, Doing Her Best for Uncle Sam." This was the thirteenth volume of the Ruth Fielding Series.
Of the twelve books that have gone before that only a brief mention can be made while Ruth and the young French girl are waiting for an answer to the bell.
At first we meet Ruth Fielding as she approaches Cheslow and the Red Mill beside the Lumano River, where Uncle Jabez, the miserly miller, awaits her coming in no pleasant frame of mind. He is her only living relative and he considers little Ruth Fielding a "charity child." She is made to feel this by his treatment and by the way in which the girls in the district school talk of her.
Ruth makes three friends from the start, however, who, in their several ways, help her to endure her troubles. One is Aunt Alvirah Boggs, who is nobody's relation but everybody's aunt, and whom Jabez Potter, the miller, has taken from the poorhouse to