Ruth Fielding Homeward Bound; A Red Cross Worker's Ocean Perils

Nor was he prepared to fight. He would not be allowed to – unless attacked. He had been permitted to take up a passenger, and after winging his way along the battle front to the sea, was expected to return to the aviation field from which he had risen.

Nevertheless, the machine gun in the nose of the airplane needed but to have the canvas cover stripped off to be ready for action. Tom Cameron’s flashing glance caught the pilot’s attention.

“Are we going to get into it?” questioned Tom.

“Don’t unhook that belt!” commanded Stillinger. “We can do nothing yet.”

“It’s a surprise,” said Tom. “We must help.”

“You sit still!” returned his friend. “I presume you can handle that make of gat?”

Tom nodded with confidence. Stillinger shot the airplane to an upper level and headed to the north of west, endeavoring to turn the flank of the farthest Hun squadron. Over the lines the yellow smoke now rolled and billowed. An intense air barrage was being sent up. They saw a German machine stagger, swoop downward, and burst into flames before it disappeared into the smoke cloud over No Man’s Land.

Stillinger knew he was disobeying orders; but his high courage and the plain determination of his passenger to help in the fight if need arose, caused him to take a chance. It was taking just such chances that had made him an ace.

Yet, as the airplane swung higher and higher, yet nearer and nearer to the group of enemy machines nearest the sea, and as the bursts of artillery fire grew louder, it was plain that this was going to be a “hot corner.”

The rolling smoke and the fog hid a good deal of the battle. Suddenly there burst out of the murk a squadron of flying machines with the German cross painted on the under side of their wings. With them rose three French attacking airplanes, and the chatter of the machine guns became incessant.

There were eight of the enemy planes; eight to three was greater odds than Americans could observe without wishing to take a hand in the fight.

Stillinger shot his airplane up at a sharp angle, striving to get above the German machines. Once above them, by pitching the nose of his machine, the enemy would be brought under the muzzle of the machine gun which already Tom Cameron had stripped of its canvas covering.

They were between six and seven thousand feet in the air now. Without the mask, the passenger would never have been able to endure the rarified atmosphere at this altitude. Unused as he was to aviation, however, he showed the ace that he was an asset, not a liability.

The free-lance airplane was observed by the Germans, however, and three of the eight machines sprang upward to over-reach the American. It was a race in speed and endurance for the upper reaches of the air.

The fog-bank hung thickest over the sea, and the racing American airplane was close to the coastline. But so high were they, and so shrouded was the coast in fog, that Tom, looking down, could see little or nothing of the shore.

Suddenly swerving his airplane, Stillinger darted into the clammy fog-cloud. It offered refuge from the Germans and gave him a chance to manoeuvre in a way to take the enemy unaware.

The moment they were wrapped about by the cloud the American pilot shot the airplane downward. He no longer strove to meet the three German machines on the high levels. If he could get under them, and slant the nose of his machine sharply upward, the machine gun would do quite as much damage to the underside of the German airplane as could be done from above. Indeed, the underside of the tail of a flying machine is quite as vulnerable a part as any.

But flying in the fog was an uncertain and trying experience. Where the German airplanes were, Stillinger could only guess. He shut off his engine for a moment that they might listen for the sputtering reports of the Hun motors.

It was then, to his, as well as to Tom Cameron’s, amazement, that they heard the stuttering reports of an engine – a much heavier engine than that of even a Fokker or Gotha – an engine that shook the air all about them. And the noise rose from beneath!

Stillinger could keep his engine shut off but a few seconds. As the popping of its exhaust began once more a bulky object was thrust up through the fog below. That is, it seemed thrust up to meet them, because the American plane was falling.

In half a minute, however, their machine was steadied. Tom uttered a great shout. He was looking down through the wire stays at the enormous bulk of an airship, the like of which he had never before seen close to.

Once he had examined the wreck of a Zeppelin after it had been brought down behind the French lines. These mammoth ships were being used by the Hun only to cross the North Sea and the Channel to bomb English cities. This present one must have strayed from its direct course, for it was headed seaward and in a southwest direction.

Taking advantage of the fog, it was putting to sea, having flown directly over the British or Belgian lines. While the fighting planes attacked the Allied squadrons of the air, thus making a diversion, this big Zeppelin endeavored to get by and carry on out to sea, its objective point perhaps being a distant part of the Channel coast of England.

Where it was going, or the reason therefore, did not much interest Ralph Stillinger and Tom Cameron. The fact that the great airship was beneath their airplane was sufficiently startling to fill the excited minds of the two young Americans.

Were they observed by the Huns? Could they wreak some serious damage upon the Zeppelin before their own presence – and their own peril – was apprehended by the crew of the great airship?

CHAPTER VIII – AFLOAT

The Admiral Pekhard nosed her way out of the port just as dusk fell. She dropped her pilot off the masked light at the end of the last great American dock – a dock big enough to hold the Leviathan– and thereafter followed the stern lights of a destroyer. Thus she got into the roadstead, and thence into the open sea.

The work of the Allied and American navies at this time was such that not all ships returning to America could be convoyed through the submarine zone. This ship on which Ruth Fielding had taken passage for home was accompanied by the destroyer only for a few miles off Brest Harbor.

The passengers, however, did not know this. They were kept off the open decks during the night, and before morning the Admiral Pekhard was entirely out of sight of land, and out of sight of every other vessel as well. Therefore neither Ruth nor any other of the passengers was additionally worried by the fact that the craft was quite unguarded.

The Admiral Pekhard mounted a gun fore and aft, and the crews of these guns were under strict naval discipline. They were on watch, turn and turn about, all through the day and night for the submarines which, of course, were somewhere in these waters.

The Admiral Pekhard was not a fast ship; but she was very comfortably furnished, well manned, and was said to be an even sailing vessel in stormy weather. She had been bearing wounded men back to England for months, but was now being sent to America to bring troops over to take the place of the wounded English fighters.

Ruth learned these few facts and some others at dinner that night. There were some wounded American and Canadian officers going home; but for the most part the passengers in the first cabin were Red Cross workers, returning commissioners both military and civil, a group of Congressmen who had been getting first-hand information of war conditions.

Then there were a few people whom the girl could not exactly place. For instance, there was the woman who sat next to her at the dinner table.

She was not an old woman, but her short hair, brushed straight back over her ears like an Americanized Chinaman’s, was streaked with gray. She was sallow, pale-lipped, and with a pair of very bright black eyes – snapping eyes, indeed. She wore her clothes as carelessly as she might have worn a suit of gunnysacking on a desert island. Her eyeglasses were prominent, astride a more prominent nose. She was not uninteresting looking.

“As aggressive as a gargoyle,” Ruth thought. “And almost as homely! Yet she surely possesses brains.”

On her other hand at table Ruth found a kindly faced Red Cross officer of more than middle age, who offered her aid at a moment when a friend was appreciated. Ruth did very well with the oysters and soup; and she made out with the fish course. But when meat and vegetables and a salad came on, the girl had to be helped in preparing the food on her plate.

The black-eyed woman watched the girl of the Red Mill curiously, seeing her left arm bandaged.

“Hurt yourself?” she asked shortly, in rather a gruff tone.

“No,” said Ruth simply. “I was hurt. I did not do it myself.”

“Ah-ha!” ejaculated the strange woman. “Are you literal, or merely smart?”

“I am only exact,” Ruth told her.

“So! You did not hurt yourself? How, then?” and she glanced significantly at the girl’s bandaged arm.

“Why, do you know,” the girl of the Red Mill said, flushing a little, “there is a country called Germany, in Central Europe, and the German Kaiser and his people are attacking France and other countries. And one of the cheerful little tricks those Germans play is to send over bombing machines to bomb our hospitals. I happened to be working in a hospital they bombed.”

“Ah-ha!” said the woman coolly. “Then you are merely smart, after all.”

“No!” said Ruth, suddenly losing her vexation, for this person she decided was not quite responsible. “No. For, if I were really smart, I should have been so far behind the lines that the Hun would never have found me.”

The black-eyed woman seemed to feel Ruth’s implied scorn after all.

“Oh!” she said, resetting her eyeglasses with both hands, “I have been in Paris all through the war.”

“Oh, then you’d heard about it?” Ruth intimated. “Well!”

“I certainly know all about the war,” said the woman shortly.

The girl of the Red Mill seldom felt antagonism toward people – even unpleasant people. But there was something about this woman that she found very annoying. She turned her bandaged shoulder to her, and gave her attention to the Red Cross officer.