There was Gerry Hull, of course. He was in this land of the enemy somewhere--alive or dead. When she was entering Germany she had thought of herself as coming, somehow, to find and to aid him. But what she had gained meant that now she must abandon him. She gazed toward the railroad and to the white streak of the road to Lauengratz, upon which, after a few minutes, a motor again passed; more horsemen appeared and more specks of walking men. But through the woods was silence; the axmen, whom she had heard before, began to fell other trees; and the steadiness of the sound brought Ruth reassurance. Whatever search was being made below had not yet disturbed the woodsmen near her. Yet she arose and crept a few hundred yards farther up the mountainside, and under heavier cover, before she dropped to the ground again. She found herself more relaxed as the rowels of peril, which had goaded her mercilessly, ceased to incite fresh strength for farther flight. All her nerves and senses remained alert; but her body was exhausted and sore. She was hungry, too; and though nothing was farther from her thought than sleep, nevertheless she suffered the result not only of the strains of the morning, but also of her sleeplessness during the night. She was cold, having changed from her suit to a linen street dress which had been Cynthia Gail’s, and she was without a hat; so she sought the sun once more and sat back to a tree and rested. If recaptured--she thought of herself as having been captured by von Forstner--she recognized that she would be shot. Therefore her recapture with von Forstner’s reports upon her could not make her fate worse; and in any case she determined to preserve them as proof to the French--if she ever regained access to the French--that the information which she bore was authentic. She did up the papers and the stencils together and secreted them under her clothing. She tried to imagine what Adler and Oberst-Lieutenant von Fallenbosch--who undoubtedly was now saying to Adler a good deal more than the secretary had dreaded--would expect her to do so that she could choose the opposite course. The alternatives, obviously, were effort to reach the Swiss frontier and in some way elude the border guards or to make for the Alsace front, where the French and the Americans were fighting. This second allured her powerfully; but, to attempt it, meant leaving this friendly cover of the Black Forest--which would hide her almost to the Swiss frontier--and crossing west to the Rhine and across to the Rhine Canal, and almost the whole way across Alsace to the Vosges Mountains, where the opposing trenches twisted. She knew that behind the German fighting front she would encounter a military zone of many miles, much more difficult to penetrate than the civilian zone bounding the soldier-sentineled barriers at the Swiss frontier. But, just beyond that zone in Alsace lay American battalions; above it would be flying American battleplanes.