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CHAPTER VII – ON THE WAY

Tom Cameron came home on a furlough from the officers’ training camp the day that the boys of the first draft departed from Cheslow. It stabbed the hearts of many mothers and fathers with a quick pain to see him march through the street so jaunty and debonair.

“Why, Tommy!” his sister cried. “You’re a man!”

“Lay off! Lay off!” begged her twin, not at all pleased. “You might have awakened to the fact that I was out of rompers some years ago. Your eyesight has been bad.”

Indeed, he was rather inclined to ignore her and “flock with his father,” as Helen put it to Ruth. The father and son had something in common now that the girl could not altogether understand. They sat before the cold grate in the library, their chairs drawn near to each other, and smoked sometimes for an hour without saying a word.

“But, Ruthie,” Helen said, her eyes big and moist, “each seems to know just what the other is thinking about. Sometimes papa says a word, and sometimes Tom; and the other nods and there is perfect understanding. It – it’s almost uncanny.”

“I think I know what you mean,” said the more observant girl of the Red Mill. “We grew up some time ago, Helen. And you know we have rather thought of Tom as a boy, still.

“But he is a man now. There is a difference in the sexes in their attitude to this war which should establish in all our minds that we are not equal.”

“Who aren’t equal?” demanded Helen, almost wrathfully, for she was a militant feminist.

“Men and women are not equal, dear. And they never will be. Wearing mannish clothes and doing mannish labor will never give women the same outlook upon life that men have. And when men encourage us to believe that our minds are the same as theirs, they do it almost always for their own selfish ends – or because there is something feminine about their minds.”

“Traitor!” cried Helen.

“No,” sighed Ruth. “Only honesty.

“Tom and his father understand each other’s thoughts and feelings as you and your father never could. After all, in the strongest association between father and daughter there is the barrier of sex that cannot be surmounted. You know yourself, Helen, that at a certain point you consider your father much of a big boy and treat him accordingly. That, they tell us, is the ‘mother instinct’ in the female, and I guess it is.

“On the other hand, I have seen girls and their mothers together (we never had mothers after we were little kiddies, Helen, and we’ve missed it) but I have seen such perfect understanding and appreciation between mothers and their daughters that it was as though the same soul dwelt in two bodies.”

Helen sniffed in mingled scorn and doubt over Ruth’s philosophy. Then she said in an aggrieved tone: “But papa and Tom ought not to shut me out of their lives – even in a small way.”

“The penalty of being a girl,” replied Ruth, practically. “Tom doesn’t believe, I suppose, that girls would quite understand his manly feelings,” she added with a sudden elfish smile.

“Cat’s foot!” ejaculated the twin, with scorn.

Tom Cameron, however, did not run altogether true to form if Ruth was right in her philosophy. He had always been used to talking seriously at times with Ruth, and during this furlough he found time to have a long and confidential talk with the girl of the Red Mill. This might be the only furlough he would have before sailing for France, for he had already obtained his commission as second lieutenant.

There was an understanding between the young man and Ruth Fielding – an unspoken and tacit feeling that they were “made for each other.” They were young. Ruth’s thoughts had never dwelt much upon love and marriage. She never looked on each man she met half-wonderingly as a possible husband. She had never met any man with this feeling. Perhaps, in part, that was, unconsciously to herself, because Tom had always been so a part of her life and her thoughts. Lately, however, she had come to the realization that if Tom should really ask her to marry him when his education was completed and he was established in the world, the girl of the Red Mill would be very likely to consider his offer seriously.

“Things aren’t coming out just as we had planned, Ruth,” the young man said on this occasion. “I guess this war is going to knock a lot of plans in the head. If it lasts several years, many of us fellows, if we come through it safely, will feel that we are too old to go back to college.

“Can you imagine a fellow who has spent months in the trenches, and has done the things that the soldiers are having to do and to endure and to learn over there – can you imagine his coming back here and going to school again?”

“Oh, Tom! I suppose that is so. The returned soldier must feel vastly older and more experienced in every way than men who have never heard the bursting of shells and the rattle of machine guns. Oh, dear, Tommy! Are we going to know you at all when you come back?”

“Maybe not,” grinned Tom. “I may raise whiskers. Most of the poilus do, I understand. But you could not really imagine a regiment of Uncle Sam’s soldiers that were not clean shaven.”

“We want to see it all, too – Helen and I,” Ruth said, sighing. “We are so far away from the front.”

“Goodness!” he exclaimed. “I should think you would be glad.”

“But some women must go,” Ruth told him gravely. “Why not us?”

“You – Well, I don’t know about you, Ruth. You seem somehow different. I expect you could look out for yourself anywhere. But Helen hasn’t got your sense.”

“Hear him!” gasped Ruth.

“It’s true,” he declared doggedly. “She hasn’t. Father and I have talked it over. Nell is crazy to go – and I tell father he would be crazy to let her. But it may be that he will go to London and Paris himself, for there is some work he can do for the Government. Of course, Helen would insist upon accompanying him in that event.”

“Oh, Tom!” exclaimed Ruth again.

“Why, they’d take you along, of course, if you wanted to go,” said Tom.

“But I don’t wish to go in any such way,” the girl of the Red Mill declared. “I want to go for just one purpose —to help. And it must be something worth while. There will be enough dilettante assistants in every branch of the work. My position must mean something to the cause, as well as to me, or I will stay right here in Cheslow.”

He looked at her with the old admiration dawning in his eyes.

“Ah! The same old Ruthie, aren’t you?” he murmured. “The same independent, ambitious girl, whose work must count. Well, I fancy your chance will come. We all seem to be on our way. I wonder to what end?”

There was no sentimental outcome of their talk. After all they were only over the line between boy-and-girlhood and the grown-up state. Tom was too much of a man to wish to anchor a girl to him by any ties when the future was so uncertain. And nothing had really ever happened to them to stir those deeper passions which must rise to the surface when two people talk of love.

They were merely the best of friends. They had no other ties of a warmer nature than those which bound them in friendship to each other. They felt confidence in each other if the future was propitious; but now —

“I am sure you will make your mark in the army, Tom, dear,” Ruth said to him. “And I shall think of you – wherever you are and wherever I am – always!”

CHAPTER VIII – THE NEAREST DUTY

The county drive for Red Cross funds had been a great success; and many people declared that Ruth’s work had been that which had told the most in the effort. Uncle Jabez inspired many of the more parsimonious of the county to follow his lead in giving to the cause. And, of course, “The Boys of the Draft” was making money for the Red Cross all over the country, as well as in and about Cheslow.

After Tom Cameron went back to camp Ruth’s longing for real service in the war work fairly obsessed her mind. She could, of course, offer herself to do some unimportant work in France, paying her own transportation and expenses, and become one of that small army of women who first went over, many of whom were more ornamental, if the truth were told, than useful in the grim work that was to follow.

But the girl of the Red Mill, as she told Tom Cameron, wished to make whatever she did count. Yet she was spurred by no inordinate desire for praise or adulation. Merely she wanted to feel that she actually was doing her all for Uncle Sam.

Being untrained in nursing it could not be hospital work – not of the usual kind. Ruth wanted something that her capabilities fitted. Something she could do and do well. Something that was of a responsible nature and would count in the long run for the cause of humanity.

Meanwhile she did not refuse the small duties that fell to her lot. She was always ready to “jump in” and do her share in any event. Helen often said that her chum’s doctrinal belief was summed up in the quotation from the Sunday school hymn: “You in your small corner, and I in mine!”

One day at the Cheslow chapter it was said that there was need of somebody who could help out in the supply department of the State Headquarters in Robinsburg. A woman or girl was desired who would not have to be paid a salary, and preferably one who could pay her own living expenses.

“That’s me!” exclaimed Ruth to Helen. “I certainly can fill that bill.”

“But it really amounts to nothing, dear,” her chum said doubtfully. “It seems a pity to waste your brain and perfectly splendid ideas for organization and the like in such a position.”

“Fiddle-de-dee!” ejaculated Ruth, quoting Uncle Jabez. “Nobody has yet appreciated my ‘perfectly splendid ideas of organization,’” and she repeated the phrase with some scorn, “so I would better put forward some of my more simple talents. I have a good head for figures, I can letter packages, I can even stick stamps on letters and do other office work. My capabilities will not be strained. And, then,” she added, “I feel that in State Headquarters I may be in a better position to ‘grab off’ something really worth while.”

“‘Johannah on the spot,’ as it were?” said Helen. “But you’ll have to go down there to live, Ruthie.”

“The Y. W. C. A. will take me in, I am sure,” declared her friend. “I am not afraid of being alone in a great city – at my age and with my experience!”

She telephoned to Robinsburg and was told to come on. Naturally, by this time, the heads of the State Red Cross, at least, knew who Ruth Fielding was.

But every girl who had raised a large sum of money for the cause was not suited to such work as was waiting for her at headquarters. She knew that she must prove her fitness.

Helen took her over in the car the next morning and was inclined to be tearful when they separated.

“Just does seem as though I couldn’t get on without you, Ruthie!” she cried.

“Why, you are worse than poor Aunt Alvirah! Every time I go away from home she acts as though I might never come back again. And as for you, Helen Cameron, you have plenty to do. You have my share of Red Cross work in Cheslow to do as well as your own. Don’t forget that.”

Headquarters was a busy place. The very things Ruth told Helen she could do, she did do – and a multitude besides. Everything was systematized, and the work went on in a businesslike manner. Everybody was working hard and unselfishly.

At least, so Ruth at first thought. Then, before she had been there two days, she chanced into another department upon an errand and came face to face with Mrs. Rose Mantel, the woman in black.

“Oh! How d’do!” said the woman with her set smile. “I heard you were coming here to help us, Miss Fielding. Hope you’ll like it.”

“I hope so,” Ruth returned gravely.

She had very little to say to the woman in black, although the latter, as the days passed, seemed desirous of ingratiating herself into the college girl’s good opinion. But that Mrs. Mantel could not do.

It seemed that Mrs. Mantel was an expert bookkeeper and accountant. She confided to Ruth that, before she had married and “dear Herny” had died, she had been engaged in the offices of one of the largest cotton brokerage houses in New Orleans. She still had a little money left from “poor Herny’s” insurance, and she could live on that while she was “doing her bit” for the Red Cross.

Ruth made no comment. Of a sudden Mrs. Mantel seemed to have grown patriotic. No more did she repeat slanders of the Red Cross, but was working for that organization.

Ruth Fielding would not forbid a person “seeing the light” and becoming converted to the worthiness of the cause; but somehow she could not take Mrs. Mantel and her work at their face value.

Gradually, as the weeks fled, Ruth became acquainted with others of the busy workers; with Mr. Charles Mayo, who governed this headquarters and seldom spoke of anything save the work – so she did not know whether he had a family, or social life, or anything else but just Red Cross.

There was a Mr. Legrand, whom she did not like so well. He seemed to be a Frenchman, although he spoke perfect English. He was a dark man with steady, keen eyes behind thick lenses, and, unusual enough in this day, he wore a heavy beard. His voice was a bark, but it did not seem that he meant to be unpleasant.

Legrand and a man named José, who could be nothing but a Mexican, often were with the woman in black – both in the offices and out of them. Ruth took her meals at a restaurant near by, although she roomed in the Y. W. C. A. building, as she said she should. In that restaurant she often saw the woman in black dining with her two cavaliers, as Ruth secretly termed Legrand and José.

It was a trio that the girl of the Red Mill found herself interested in, but with whom she wished to have nothing to do.

All sorts and conditions of people, however, were turning to Red Cross work. “Why,” Ruth asked herself, “criticize the intentions of any of them?” She felt sometimes as though her condemnation of Mrs. Mantel, even though secret, was really wicked.

But in the bookkeeping and accounting department – handling the funds that came in, as well as the expense accounts – a dishonest person might do much harm to the cause. And Ruth knew in her heart that Mrs. Mantel was not an honest woman.

Her tale that day at the Ladies’ Aid Society, in Cheslow, had been false – strictly false. The woman knew it at the time, and she knew it now. Ruth was sure that every time Mrs. Mantel looked at her with her set smile she was thinking that Ruth had caught her in a prevarication and had not forgotten it.

Yet the girl of the Red Mill felt that she could say nothing about Mrs. Mantel to Mr. Mayo, or to anybody else in authority. She had no proved facts.

Besides, she had never been so busy before in all her life, and Ruth Fielding was no sluggard. It seemed as though every moment of her waking hours was filled and running over with duties.

She often worked long into the evening in her department at the Red Cross bureau. She might have missed the folks at home and her girl friends more had it not been for the work that crowded upon her.

One evening, as she came down from the loft above the business office where she had been working alone, she remarked that there was a light in the office. Mrs. Mantel and her assistants did not usually work at night.

The door stood ajar. Ruth looked in with frank curiosity. She saw Mr. José, the black-looking Mexican, alone in the room. He had taken both of the chemical fire extinguishers from the wall – one had hung at one end of the room and the other at the other end – and was doing something to them. Repairing them, perhaps, or merely cleaning them. He sat there cheerfully whistling in a low tone and manipulating a polishing rag, or something of the kind. He had a bucket beside him.

“I wonder if he can’t sleep nights, and that is why he is so busily engaged?” thought Ruth, as she went on out of the building. “I never knew of his being so workative before.”

But the matter made no real impression on her mind. It was a transitory thought entirely. She went to her clean little cell in the Y. W. C. A. home and forgot all about Mr. José and the fire extinguishers.

CHAPTER IX – TOM SAILS, AND SOMETHING ELSE HAPPENS

“You can see your son, Second Lieutenant Thomas Cameron, before he sails for France, if you will be at the Polk Hotel, at eight o’clock to-morrow p. m.”

There have been other telegrams sent and received of more moment than the above, perhaps; but none that could have created a more profound impression in the Cameron household.

There have been not a few similar messages put on the telegraph wires and received by anxious parents during these months since America has really got into the World War.

There is every necessity for secrecy in the sailing of the transports for France. The young officers themselves have sometimes told more to their relatives than they should before the hour of sailing. So the War Department takes every precaution to safeguard the crossing of our boys who go to fight the Huns.

With Mr. Cameron holding an important government position and being ready himself to go across before many weeks, it was only natural that he should have this information sent him that he might say good-bye to Tom. The latter had already been a fortnight with “his boys” in the training camp and was fixed in his assignment to his division of the expeditionary forces.

Ruth chanced to be at the Outlook, as the Cameron home was called, for over Sunday when this telegram was received. Both she and Helen were vastly excited.

“Oh, I’m going with you! I must see Tommy once more,” cried the twin with an outburst of sobs and tears that made her father very unhappy.

“My dear! You cannot,” Mr. Cameron tried to explain.

“I can! I must!” the girl cried. “I know I’ll never see Tommy again. He – he’s going over there to – to be shot – ”

“Don’t, dear!” begged Ruth, taking her chum into her arms. “You must not talk that way. This is war – ”

“And is war altogether a man’s game? Aren’t we to have anything to say about it, or what the Government shall do with our brothers?”

“It is no game,” sighed Ruth Fielding. “It is a very different thing. And our part in it is to give, and give generously. Our loved ones if we must.”

“I don’t want to give Tom!” Helen declared. “I can never be patriotic enough to give him to the country. And that’s all there is to it!”

“Be a good girl, Helen, and brace up,” advised her father, but quite appreciating the girl’s feelings. There had always been a bond between the Cameron twins stronger than that between most brothers and sisters.

“I know I shall never see him again,” wailed the girl.

“I hope he’ll not hear that you said that, dear,” said the girl of the Red Mill, shaking her head. “We must send him away with cheerfulness. You tell him from me, Mr. Cameron, that I send my love and I hope he will come back a major at least.”

“He’ll be killed!” Helen continued to wail. “I know he will!”

But that did not help things a mite. Mr. Cameron went off late that night and reached the rendezvous called for in the telegram. It was in a port from which several transports were sailing within a few hours, and he came back with a better idea of what it meant for thousands of men under arms to get away on a voyage across the seas.

Tom was busy with his men; but he had time to take supper with his father at the hotel and then got permission for Mr. Cameron to go aboard the ship with him and see how comfortable the War Department had made things for the expeditionary force.

Mr. Cameron stopped at Robinsburg on his return to tell Ruth about it, for she had returned to Headquarters, of course, on Monday, and was working quite as hard as before. He brought, too, a letter for Ruth from Tom, and just what their soldier-boy said in that missive the girl of the Red Mill never told.

Ruth was left, when her friends’ father went on to Cheslow, with a great feeling of emptiness in her life. It was not alone because of Tom’s departure for France; Mr. Cameron and Helen, too, would soon go across the sea.

Mr. Cameron had repeated Helen’s offer – that Ruth should accompany them. But the girl, though grateful, refused. She did not for a moment belittle his efforts for the Government, or Helen’s interest in the war.

But Mr. Cameron was a member of a commission that was to investigate certain matters and come back to make report. He would not be over there long.

As for Helen, Ruth was quite sure she would join some association of wealthy women and girls in Paris, as Jennie Stone had, and consider that she was “doing her bit.” Ruth wanted something more real than that. She was in earnest. She did not wish to be carefully sheltered from all hard work and even from the dangers “over there.” She desired a real part in what was going forward.

Nevertheless, while waiting her chance, she did not allow herself to become gloomy or morose. That was not Ruth Fielding’s way.

“I always know where to come when I wish to see a cheerful face,” Mr. Mayo declared, putting his head in at her door one day. “You always have a smile on tap. How do you do it?”

“I practice before my glass every morning,” Ruth declared, laughing. “But sometimes, during the day, I’m afraid my expression slips. I can’t always remember to smile when I am counting and packing these sweaters, and caps, and all, for the poor boys who, some of them, are going to stand up and be shot, or gassed, or blinded by liquid fire.”

“It is hard,” sighed the chief, wagging his head. “If it wasn’t knowing that we are doing just a little good – But not as much as I could wish! Collections seem very small. Our report is not going to be all I could wish this month.”

He went away, leaving Ruth with a thought that did not make it any easier for her to smile. She saw people all day long coming into the building and seeking out the cashier’s desk, where Mrs. Mantel sat, to hand over contributions of money to the Red Cross. If only each brought a dollar there should be a large sum added to the local treasury each day.

There was no way of checking up these payments. The money passed through the hands of the lady in black and only by her accounts on the day ledger and a system of card index taken from that ledger by Mr. Legrand, who worked as her assistant, could the record be found of the moneys contributed to the Red Cross at this station.

Ruth Fielding was not naturally of a suspicious disposition; but the honesty of Mrs. Mantel and the real interest of that woman in the cause were still keenly questioned in Ruth’s mind.

She wondered if Mr. Mayo knew who the woman really was. Was her story of widowhood, and of her former business experience in New Orleans strictly according to facts? What might be learned about the woman in black if inquiry was made in that Southern city?

Yet at times Ruth would have felt condemned for her suspicions had it not been for the daily sight of Mrs. Mantel’s hard smile and her black, glittering eyes.

“Snakes’ eyes,” thought the girl of the Red Mill. “Quite as bright and quite as malevolent. Mrs. Mantel certainly does not love me, despite her soft words and sweet smile.”

There was some stir in the headquarters at last regarding a large draft of Red Cross workers to make up another expeditionary force to France. Two full hospital units were going and a base supply unit as well. Altogether several hundred men and women would sail in a month’s time for the other side.

Ruth’s heart beat quicker at the thought. Was there a prospect for her to go over in some capacity with this quota?

Most of the candidates for all departments of the expeditionary force were trained in the work they were to do. It was ridiculous to hope for an appointment in the hospital force. No nurse among them all had served less than two years in a hospital, and many of them had served three and four.

She asked Mr. Mayo what billets there were open in the supply unit; but the chief did not know. The State had supplied few workers as yet who had been sent abroad; Robinsburg, up to this time, none at all.

“Why, Miss Fielding, you must not think of going over there!” he cried. “We need you here. If all our dependable women go to France, how shall we manage here?”

“You would manage very well,” Ruth told him. “This should be a training school for the work over there. I know that I can give any intelligent girl such an idea of my work in three weeks that you would never miss me.”

“Impossible, Miss Fielding!”

“Quite possible, I assure you. I want to go. I feel I can do more over there than I can here. A thousand girls who can’t go could be found to do what I do here. Approve my application, will you please, Mr. Mayo?”

He did this after some hesitation. “Am I going to lose everybody at once?” he grumbled.

“Why, only poor little me,” laughed Ruth Fielding.

“Yours is the seventh application I have O.K.’d. And several others may ask yet. The fire is spreading.”

“Oh! Who?”

“We are going to lose Mrs. Mantel for one. I understand that the Red Cross wants her for a much more important work in France.”

For a little while Ruth doubted after all if she so much desired to go to France. The fact that Mrs. Mantel was going came as a shock to her mind and made her hesitate. Suppose she should meet the woman in black over there? Suppose her work should be connected with that of the woman whom she so much suspected and disliked?

Then her better sense and her patriotism came to the force. What had she to do with Mrs. Mantel, after all? She was not the woman’s keeper. Nor could it be possible that Mrs. Mantel would disturb herself much over Ruth Fielding, no matter where they might meet.

Was Ruth Fielding willing to work for the Red Cross only in ways that would be wholly pleasant and with people of whom she could entirely approve? The girl asked herself this seriously.

She put the thought behind her with distaste at her own narrowness of vision. Born of Yankee stock, she was naturally conservative to the very marrow of her bones. This New England attitude is not altogether a curse; but it sometimes leads one out of broad paths.

Surely the work was broad enough for both her and the woman in black to do what they might without conflict. “I’ll do my part; what has Mrs. Mantel to do with me?” she determined.

Before Ruth had a chance to tell her chum of the application she had put in, Helen wrote her hurriedly that Mr. Cameron’s commission was to sail in two days from Boston. Ruth could not leave her work, but she wrote a long letter to her dearest chum and sent it by special delivery to the Boston hotel, where she knew the Camerons would stop for a night.

It really seemed terrible, that her chum and her father should go without Ruth seeing them again; but she did not wish to leave her work while her application for an assignment to France was pending. It might mean that she would lose her chance altogether.

She only told Helen in the letter that she, too, hoped to be “over there” some day soon.

But several days slipped by and her case was not mentioned by Mr. Mayo. It seemed pretty hard to Ruth. She was ready and able to go and nobody wanted her!

The weather chanced to be unpleasant, too, and that is often closely linked up to one’s very deepest feelings. Ruth’s philosophy could not overcome the effect of a foggy, dripping day. Her usual cheerfulness dropped several degrees.

It drew on toward evening, and the patter of raindrops on the panes grew louder. The glistening umbrellas in the street, as she looked down upon them from the window, looked like many, many black mushrooms. Ruth knew she would have a dreary evening.

Suddenly she heard a door bang on the floor below – a shout and then a crash of glass. Next —

“Fire! Fire! Fire!”

In an instant she was out of her room and at the head of the stairs. It was an old building – a regular firetrap. Mr. Mayo had dashed out of his office and was shouting up the stairs:

“Come down! Down, every one of you! Fire!”

Through the open transom over the door of Mrs. Mantel’s office Ruth saw that one end of the room was ablaze.