The prefect of police at Lyse was quite right. Clair was within sound of
the big guns. Indeed, Ruth became aware of their steady monotone long
before the rattling car reached its destination.
As the first hour sped by and the muttering of the guns came nearer and
nearer, the girl asked Charlie Bragg if there was danger of one of the
projectiles, that she began faintly to hear explode individually, coming
their way. Was not this road a perilous one?
"Oh, no, ma'am!" he declared. "Oh, yes, this road has been bombarded
more than once. Don't you notice how crooked it is? We turn out for the
shell holes and make a new road, that's all. But there's no danger."
"But aren't you frightened at all--ever?" murmured the girl of the Red
Mill.
"What is there to be afraid of?" asked the boy, whom his family called
"Bubby." "If they get you they get you, and that's all there is to it.
"We have to stop here and put the lights out," he added, seeing a gaunt
post beside the road on which was a half-obliterated sign.
"If you have to do that it must be perilous," declared Ruth.
"No. It's just an order. Maybe they've forgotten to take the sign down.
But I don't want to be stopped by one of these old territorials--or even
by one of our own military police. You don't know when you're likely to
run into one of them. Or maybe it's a marine. Those are the boys,
believe me! They're on the job first and always."
"But this time you boys who came to France to run automobiles got ahead
of even the marine corps," laughed Ruth. "Oh! What's that?"
They were then traveling a very dark bit of road. Right across the
gloomy way and just ahead of the machine something white dashed past. It
seemed to cross the road in two or three great leaps and then sailed
over the hedge on the left into a field.
"Did you see it?" asked Charlie Bragg, and there was a queer shake in
his voice.
"Why, what is it? There it goes--all white!" and the excited girl pointed
across the field, half standing up in the rocking car to do so.
"Going for the lines," said the young driver.
"Is it a dog? A big dog? And he didn't bark or anything!"
"Never does bark," said her companion. "They say they can't bark."
"Then it's a wolf! Wolves don't bark," Ruth suggested.
"I guess that's right. They say they are dumb. Gosh! I don't know,"
Charlie said. "You didn't really see anything, did you?" and he said it
so very oddly that Ruth Fielding was perfectly amazed.
"What do you mean by that?" she demanded. "I saw just as much as you
did."
"Well, I'm not sure that I saw anything," he told her slowly. "The
French say it's the werwolf--and that means just nothing at all."
"Goodness!" exclaimed Ruth, repeating the word. "What old-world
superstition is that? The ghost of a wolf?"
"They have a story that certain people, selling themselves to the Devil,
can change at will into the form of a wolf," went on Charlie.
"Oh, I know! They have that legend in every language there is, I guess,"
Ruth returned.
"Now you've said it!"
"How ridiculous that sounds--in this day and generation. You don't mean
that people around here believe such stories?"
"They do."
"And you half believe it yourself, Mr. Bragg," cried Ruth, laughing.
"I tell you what it is," the young fellow said earnestly, while still
guiding the car through the dark way with a skill that was really
wonderful. "There are a whole lot of things I don't know in this world.
I didn't used to think so; but I do now."
"But you don't believe in magic--either black or white?"
"I know that that thing you saw just now--and that I have seen twice
before--flies through this country just like that, and at night. It never
makes a sound. Soldiers have shot at it, and either missed--or their
bullets go right through it."
"Oh, how absurd!"
"Isn't it?" and perhaps Charlie Bragg grinned. But he went on seriously
enough: "I don't know. I'm only telling you what they say. If it is a
white or gray dog, it leaps the very trenches and barbed-wire
entanglements on the front--so they say. It has been seen doing so. No
one has been able to shoot it. It crosses what they call No Man's Land
between the two battlefronts."
"It carries despatches to the Germans, then!" cried Ruth.
"That is what the military authorities say," said Charlie. "But these
peasants don't believe that. They say the werwolf was here long before
the war. There is a chateau over back here--not far from the outskirts of
Clair. The people say that _the woman_ lives there."
"What do you mean--the woman?" asked Ruth, between jounces, as the car
took a particularly rough piece of the road on high gear.
"The one who is the werwolf," said Charlie, and he tried to laugh.
"Mr. Bragg!"
"Well, I'm only telling you what they say," he explained. "Lots of funny
things are happening in this war. But _this_ began before August,
nineteen-fourteen, according to their tell."
"Whose tell? And what other 'funny' things do you believe have
happened?" the girl asked, with some scorn.
"That's all right," he declared more stoutly. "When you've been here as
long as I have you'll begin to wonder if there isn't something in all
these things you hear tell of. Why, don't you know that fifty per cent,
at least, of the French people--poilus and all--believe that the spirit of
Joan of Arc led them to victory against the Boches in the worst battle
of all?"
"I have heard something of that," Ruth admitted quietly. "But that does
not make me believe in werwolves."
"No. But you should hear old Gaston Pere tell about this dog, or wolf,
or ghost, or whatever it is. Gaston keeps the toll-bridge just this side
of Clair. You'll likely see him to-night. He told me all about the
woman."
"For pity's sake, Mr. Bragg!" gasped Ruth. "Tell me more. You have got
my feelings all harrowed up. You can't possibly believe in such
things--not really?"
"I'm only saying what Gaston--and others--say. This woman is a very great
lady. A countess. She is an Alsatian--but not the right kind."
"What do you mean by that?" interrupted Ruth.
"All Alsatians are not French at heart," said the young man. "This
French count married her years ago. She has two sons and both are in the
French army. But it is said that she has had influence enough to keep
them off the battle front.
"Oh, it sounds queer, and crazy, and all!" he added, with sudden
vehemence. "But you saw that white thing flashing by yourself. It is
never seen save at night, and always coming or going between the chateau
and the battle lines, or between the lines themselves--out there in No
Man's Land.
"It used to race the country roads in the same direction--only as far as
the then frontier--before the war. So they say. Months before the Germans
spilled over into this country. There you have it.
"The military authorities believe it is a despatch-carrying dog. The
peasants say the old countess is a werwolf. She keeps herself shut in
the chateau with only a few servants. The military authorities can get
nothing on her, and the peasants cross themselves when they pass her
gate."
Ruth said nothing for a minute or two. The guns grew louder in her ears,
and the car came down a slight hill to the edge of a river. Here was the
toll-bridge, and an old man came out with a shrouded lantern to take
toll--and to look at their papers, too, for he was an official.
"Good evening, Gaston," said Charlie Bragg.
"Evening, Monsieur," was the cheerful reply.
The American lad stooped over his wheel to whisper: "Gaston! the werwolf
just crossed the road three miles or so back, going toward----" and he
nodded in the direction of the grumbling guns.
"_Ma foi!_" exclaimed the old man. "It forecasts another bombardment or
air attack. Ah-h! La-la!"
He sighed, nodded to Ruth, and stepped back to let the car go on. The
girl felt as though she were growing superstitious herself. This surely
was a new and strange world she had come to--and a new and strange
experience.
"Do you really believe all that?" she finally asked Charlie Bragg,
point-blank.
"I tell you I don't know what I believe," he said. "But you saw the
werwolf as well as I. Now, didn't you?"
"I saw a light-colored dog of large size that ran across the track we
were following," said Ruth Fielding decisively, almost fiercely. "I'll
confess to nothing else."
But she liked Charlie Bragg just the same, and thanked him warmly when
he set her down at the door of the Clair Hospital just before midnight.
He was going on to the ambulance station, several miles nearer to the
actual front.
There were no street lights in Clair and the windows of the hospital
were all shrouded, as well as those of the dwellings left standing in
the town. Airplanes of the enemy had taken to bombing hospitals in the
work of "frightfulness."
Ruth was welcomed by a kindly Frenchwoman, who was matron, or
_directrice_, and shown to a cell where she could sleep. Her duties
began the next morning, and it was not long before the girl of the Red
Mill was deeply engaged in this new work--so deeply engaged, indeed, that
she almost forgot her suspicions about the woman in black, and Legrand
and José, or whatever their real names were.
However, Charlie Bragg's story of the werwolf, of the suspected countess
in her chateau behind Clair, and Gaston's prophecy regarding the meaning
of the ghostly appearance, were not easily forgotten. Especially, when,
two nights following Ruth's coming to the hospital, a German airman
dropped several bombs near the institution. Evidently he was trying to
get the range of the Red Cross hospital.