tops. She knew it must have leaped from a
large field on this side of the Dupay farm and not far below the
gateway of the Chateau Marchand.

Ruth stopped to gaze upward at the soaring airplane. Her figure stood
out plainly in the country road and the two men aboard the Nieuport
must have immediately spied her.

The machine dipped and scaled downward until she could have thrown a
stone upward and hit it. One of the men--masked and helmeted as the
flying men always are--leaned from his seat, and she saw him looking
down upon her through the tangle of stay-wires.

Then he dropped a small white object that fell like a plummet at her
feet!

"What in the world can that be?" murmured the girl to herself.

For a breath she was frightened. Although the aeroplane carried the
French insignia it might be an enemy machine. She, too, was obsessed
with the fear of spies!

But the object that fell was not an explosive bomb. It was a weighted
ball of oiled silk. As the machine soared again and rapidly rose to
the upper air levels, the girl picked up the strange object and burst
it open.

The lead pellets that weighted the globe were scattered on the ground.
Within there was nothing else but a strip of heavy document paper. On
this was traced in a handwriting she knew well, this unsigned message:

"Don't believe everything you hear."

It was Tom Cameron's handwriting--and Ruth knew that the message was
meant for her eye and her eye only!

CHAPTER XII

AUNT ABELARD

Of course nothing just like this ever happened save in a fairy
story--or in real life. The paper without address, but meant only for
Ruth Fielding, had fallen from the aeroplane. She had seen it fall at
her feet and could not be mistaken.

Who the two men in the French Nieuport were she could not know. Masked
and hooded as they were, she could distinguish the features of neither
the pilot nor the man who had dropped the paper bomb. But--she was
sure of this--they were somehow in communication with Tom Cameron.

And Tom Cameron was supposed to have gone across the lines to the
Germans, or--as Ruth believed--had been captured by them. Yet, if he
was a captive, how had he been able to send her this message?

Again, how did he know she was worried about him? He must have reason
to suspect that a story was being circulated regarding his
unfaithfulness.

Who were those two flying men? Were they German spies? Had Tom been a
prisoner in