done if she had laughed and joked with him. He might then have gone his way and cast never a thought back to her. But it would have been as impossible for Hilda to have laughed and joked with such a man as for a flower to masquerade as an onion.
He had his laugh out now, Mrs. Schwarz joining in with a polite, bewildered cackle, but he stopped suddenly with a frown and watched the girl as she went quietly on with her work, as seemingly shut away from these two as if she had been deaf and dumb and blind. A creature of exquisite fashioning in a world of her own. Her indifference piqued his dominating spirit and made him long to subdue her to himself; to crush this beautiful dignity of maidenhood and force her to bow to him as Super-man.
“She is very beautiful and absurdly proud, but I find her amusing,” he said to Mrs. Schwarz, and then in a tone as if he were lightly bargaining for her soul, he added lazily: “Just have it understood that she belongs to me! You understand? I may come soon again.”
Then he turned to Hilda and, in beautiful English, with all the outward courtesy of a gentleman, Said:
“I will bid you good morning, Miss Lessing! ”
In dumb amazement she stood and watched him go down the path to the barn where Schwarz and two of the other men were working over a great coil of wire. Somehow in the instant of his going it came to her like a shock: “That man is a spy!”
Over and over she said. it to herself as she watched him standing; in the sunshine; saw the immediate attitude of salute and deference of the other two as he drew near; remembered snatches of the conversation she had overheard the night before, and took in the whole thing as a revelation.
“That man is a spy! They are, perhaps, all spies!”
She stood rooted to the spot where he had left her, washing and rewashing the spider in which she had cooked his sausages, and taking in the awful thought. The horror and indignation with which she had listened to his audacious and insulting order to Mrs. Schwarz concerning her were for the moment forgotten in the amazing conviction that she had discovered a spy!
Somehow her senses seemed racing around in her body in a frenzy, and she was almost blind and breathless with trying to stop them long enough to think what it all meant. So she stood and rewashed that old greasy spider till Mrs. Schwarz's rasping voice shivered on her suffering consciousness with a thrill of pain:
“How long are you going to stand there and wash that dish, you lazy girl? Get you up the stairs and make those peds, and be quig aboud id!” she shouted. Hilda caught her breath and hurriedly finished her dishes.
Upstairs by herself, with a view out the open windows, she saw the stranger ordering everyone about. She came to herself again and began to boil with rage over the awful thing that man had dared to say about her! She belong to him! Indeed! She would rather die a thousand deaths than belong to him. She loathed and feared him with every atom of her fine sensitive being. She was convinced without knowledge or need of proof that he was a spy, a traitor to his country and a man to be despised.
And he was coming back again! Oh, horror! Somehow she must get away before he came! She must not stay in this house another day!
It came to her that he was not yet gone. He might return to the house again. She could see him standing now between the cabbage plants, pointing to the little tool house made of bricks with an iron door. Then there flashed across her mind what he had said about the powder house. Powder and dynamite! Why should they need such things on a truck farm? She had always connected them with a red flag and blasting on a city street. But powder here! What did it mean? Where did they keep it? Surely not down in that hole with the iron trap-door below her bedroom window. They wouldn't put such things near enough to a house to blow it up! The tool house! It looked too small to hide much. It was little more than a wart on the side of a bunchy hill with young corn, growing all about it. The barn? It was very large, but did they ever keep such things in a wooden building? Was that one reason why the barn was always locked? Why Schwarz was so angry at Sylvester once for leaving the door ajar?
Hilda shuddered at thought of the peril that might be all about her. She shuddered again as the sharp voice of the woman below stairs called her. She was peeling potatoes in the kitchen and her mistress was busy making pies at the kitchen table when she heard the strange whirring noise again that had so startled her in the night. She jumped and dropped a potato back into the pan again, looking up at Mrs. Schwarz with wide eyes:
“Oh, what is that?"
“How should I know? Attend to your work!” the woman answered crossly.
But Hilda's eyes were fixed on the open Window, for out of the meadow behind the barn there arose a large, bird-like structure, skimming the air, and floating upward as lightly and easily as a mote in a sunbeam.
“Why! That must have been———!” Hilda began breathlessly, then caught her breath and changed her sentence. “Why! That is an aeroplane! I have seen them sometimes far up over Chicago. But never so close. But an aeroplane out here in the country! How did it come, Mrs. Schwarz?”
There was no answer and, turning, the girl saw that the woman stood absently gazing out of the window, a. look of woe on her face and tears streaming down her cheeks.
CHAPTER IV
Hilda's heart was touched instantly. Springing toward her mistress she cried:
“Mrs. Schwarz, you are crying! Is something dreadful the matter? Oh, I am so sorry!” and she timidly put her arm about the stout shoulder that, since the words of sympathy, had begun to shake with sobs. There was something terrible in seeing this great bulk of a woman with her sharp tongue and stolid ways all broken up crying.
“It iss my poy!” she wailed into her apron. “They vill send him avay to var! My only poy! Und there iss no need. He iss too young, und I know he vill get into drubble. He vas exempt. Ve got him exempt on accound of the farm, und now the orders haf come from the Fatherland, und he must go!”
“But what has the Fatherland got to do with him?” asked Hilda puzzled. “This is America. We are Americans. Why don't you tell the Fatherland you don't want him to go?”
Hilda's heart sank within her at the thought of keeping Sylvester at borne; nevertheless, she was touched by the poor woman's grief.
But the woman shook her head and wiped her eyes despairingly.
“It iss no use!” she sighed. “Ye must do as the Fatherland orders. Ve are Germans. They know pest!”
Suddenly the voice of Schwarz boomed forth just outside the door. His wife turned as if she had been shot and bolted up the stairs. Hilda had sense enough to finish her potatoes without a sign that anything unusual had just been going on, but her mind was in a turmoil over the strange and dreadful things which were constantly being revealed to her. What did it all mean, anyway? How should the Fatherland reach out to free America and presume to order what free Americans should do? And why should they want men to go into an army with whom they were at war? A great light suddenly broke upon her understanding as she sat staring out into the brilliant blue of the sky where only a few moments ago the great aeroplane had become a mere speck and vanished out of sight. There certainly was something queer about this place, and she must get out of it just as quickly as possible. She wished with all her heart she had taken warning from the
