The Search

by Grace Livingston Hill · English · Gutenberg #25866 · 358,754 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Search

Author: Grace Livingston Hill

Release date: June 21, 2008 [eBook #25866]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/25866

Credits: E-text prepared by Roger Frank and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team

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E-text prepared by Roger Frank and the Project Gutenberg Online
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Transcriber's note:

Chapter numbering skips Chapter XI in the printed text. The
original numbering has been retained in this transcription.

THE SEARCH

GRACE LIVINGSTON HILL

Grosset & Dunlap
Publishers New York

Made in the United States of America

Printed in the United States of America

THE SEARCH

Two young men in officers' uniforms entered the smoker of a suburban
train, and after the usual formalities of matches and cigarettes settled
back to enjoy their ride out to Bryne Haven.

"What d'ye think of that girl I introduced you to the other night, Harry?
Isn't she a pippin?" asked the second lieutenant taking a luxurious puff
at his cigarette.

"I should say, Bobbie, she's some girl! Where d'ye pick her up? I
certainly owe you one for a good time."

"Don't speak of it, Harry. Come on with me and try it again. I'm going to
see her friend to-night and can get her over the 'phone any time. She's
just nuts about you. What do you say? Shall I call her up?"

"Well, hardly to-night, Bob," said the first lieutenant thoughtfully,
"she's a ripping fine girl and all that, of course, but the fact is, Bob,
I've decided to marry Ruth Macdonald and I haven't much time left before
I go over. I think I'll have to get things fixed up between us to-night,
you see. Perhaps--later----. But no. I guess that wouldn't do. Ruth's
folks are rather fussy about such things. It might get out. No, Bob, I'll
have to forego the pleasures you offer me this time."

The second lieutenant sat up and whistled:

"You've decided to marry Ruth Macdonald!" he ejaculated, staring. "But
has Ruth Macdonald decided to marry you?"

"I hardly think there'll be any trouble on that score when I get ready to
propose," smiled the first lieutenant complacently, as he lolled back in
his seat. "You seem surprised," he added.

"Well, rather!" said the other officer dryly, still staring.

"What's there so surprising about that?" The first lieutenant was
enjoying the sensation he was creating. He knew that the second
lieutenant had always been "sweet" on Ruth Macdonald.

"Well, you know, Harry, you're pretty rotten!" said the second lieutenant
uneasily, a flush beginning to rise in his face. "I didn't think you'd
have the nerve. She's a mighty fine girl, you know. She's--_unusual_!"

"Exactly. Didn't you suppose I would want a fine girl when I marry?"

"I don't believe you're really going to do it!" burst forth the second
lieutenant. "In fact, I don't believe I'll _let_ you do it if you try!"

"You couldn't stop me, Bob!" with an amiable sneer. "One word from you,
young man, and I'd put your captain wise about where you were the last
time you overstayed your leave and got away with it. You know I've got a
pull with your captain. It never pays for the pot to call the kettle
black."

The second lieutenant sat back sullenly with a deep red streaking his
cheeks.

"You're no angel yourself, Bob, see?" went on the first lieutenant lying
back in his seat in satisfied triumph, "and I'm going to marry Ruth
Macdonald next week and get a ten days' leave! Put that in your pipe and
smoke it!"

There ensued a long and pregnant silence. One glance at the second
lieutenant showed that he was most effectually silenced.

The front door of the car slammed open and shut, and a tall slim officer
with touches of silver about the edges of his dark hair, and a look of
command in his keen eyes came crisply down the aisle. The two young
lieutenants sat up with a jerk, and an undertone of oaths, and prepared
to salute as he passed them. The captain gave them a quick searching
glance as he saluted and went on to the next car.

The two jerked out salutes and settled back uneasily.

"That man gives me a pain!" said Harry Wainwright preparing to soothe his
ruffled spirits by a fresh cigarette.

"He thinks he's so doggone good himself that he has to pry into other
people's business and get them in wrong. It beats me how he ever got to
be a captain--a prim old fossil like him!"

"It might puzzle some people to know how you got your commission, Harry.
You're no fossil, of course, but you're no angel, either, and there are
some things in your career that aren't exactly laid down in military
manuals."

"Oh, my uncle Henry looked after my commission. It was a cinch! He thinks
the sun rises and sets in me, and he had no idea how he perjured himself
when he put me through. Why, I've got some of the biggest men in the
country for my backers, and wouldn't they lie awake at night if they knew!
Oh Boy! I thought I'd croak when I read some of those recommendations,
they fairly gushed with praise. You'd have died laughing, Bob, if you had
read them. They had such adjectives as 'estimable, moral, active,
efficient,' and one went so far as to say that I was equally distinguished
in college in scholarship and athletics! Some stretch of imagination, eh,
what?"

The two laughed loudly over this.

"And the best of it is," continued the first lieutenant, "the poor boob
believed it was all true!"

"But your college records, Harry, how could they get around those? Or
didn't they look you up?"

"Oh, mother fixed that all up. She sent the college a good fat check to
establish a new scholarship or something."

"Lucky dog!" sighed his friend. "Now I'm just the other way. I never try
to put anything over but I get caught, and nobody ever tried to cover up
my tracks for me when I got gay!"

"You worry too much, Bobby, and you never take a chance. Now _I_----"

The front door of the car opened and shut with a slam, and a tall young
fellow with a finely cut face and wearing workman's clothes entered. He
gave one quick glance down the car as though he was searching for
someone, and came on down the aisle. The sight of him stopped the boast
on young Wainwright's tongue, and an angry flush grew, and rolled up from
the top of his immaculate olive-drab collar to his close, military
hair-cut.

Slowly, deliberately, John Cameron walked down the aisle of the car
looking keenly from side to side, scanning each face alertly, until his
eyes lighted on the two young officers. At Bob Wetherill he merely
glanced knowingly, but he fixed his eyes on young Wainwright with a
steady, amused, contemptuous gaze as he came toward him; a gaze so
noticeable that it could not fail to arrest the attention of any who were
looking; and he finished the affront with a lingering turn of his head as
he passed by, and a slight accentuation of the amusement as he finally
lifted his gaze and passed on out of the rear door of the car. Those who
were sitting in the seats near the door might have heard the words: "And
they _killed_ such men as Lincoln!" muttered laughingly as the door
slammed shut behind him.

Lieutenant Wainwright uttered a low oath of imprecation and flung his
half spent cigarette on the floor angrily:

"Did you see that, Bob?" he complained furiously, "If I don't get that
fellow!"

"I certainly did! Are you going to stand for that? What's eating him,
anyway? Has he got it in for you again? But _he_ isn't a very easy fellow
to get, you know. He has the reputation----"

"Oh, I know! Yes, I guess anyhow _I know_!"

"Oh, I see! Licked you, too, once, did he?" laughed Wetherill, "what had
you been up to?"

"Oh, having some fun with his girl! At least I suppose she must have been
his girl the way he carried on about it. He said he didn't know her, but
of course that was all bluff. Then, too, I called his father a name he
didn't like and he lit into me again. Good night! I thought that was the
end of little Harry! I was sick for a week after he got through with me.
He certainly is some brute. Of course, I didn't realize what I was up
against at first or I'd have got the upper hand right away. I could have,
you know! I've been trained! But I didn't want to hurt the fellow and get
into the papers. You see, the circumstances were peculiar just then----"

"I see! You'd just applied for Officer's Training Camp?"

"Exactly, and you know you never can tell what rumor a person like that
can start. He's keen enough to see the advantage, of course, and follow
it up. Oh, he's got one coming to him all right!"

"Yes, he's keen all right. That's the trouble. It's hard to get him."

"Well, just wait. I've got him now. If I don't make him bite the dust! Ye
gods! When I think of the way he looks at me every time he sees me I
could skin him alive!"

"I fancy he'd be rather slippery to skin. I wouldn't like to try it,
Harry!"

"Well, but wait till you see where I've got him! He's in the draft. He
goes next week. And they're sending all those men to our camp! He'll be a
private, of course, and he'll have to _salute me_! Won't that gall him?"

"He won't do it! I know him, and _he won't do it_!"

"I'll take care that he does it all right! I'll put myself in his way and
_make_ him do it. And if he refuses I'll report him and get him in the
guard house. See? I can, you know. Then I guess he'll smile out of the
other side of his mouth!"

"He won't likely be in your company."

"That doesn't make any difference. I can get him into trouble if he
isn't, but I'll try to work it that he is if I can. I've got 'pull,' you
know, and I know how to 'work' my superiors!" he swaggered.

"That isn't very good policy," advised the other, "I've heard of men
picking off officers they didn't like when it came to battle."

"I'll take good care that he's in front of me on all such occasions!"

A sudden nudge from his companion made him look up, and there looking
sharply down at him, was the returning captain, and behind him walked
John Cameron still with that amused smile on his face. It was plain that
they had both heard his boast. His face crimsoned and he jerked out a
tardy salute, as the two passed on leaving him muttering imprecations
under his breath.

When the front door slammed behind the two Wainwright spoke in a low
shaken growl:

"Now what in thunder is that Captain La Rue going on to Bryne Haven for?
I thought, of course, he got off at Spring Heights. That's where his
mother lives. I'll bet he is going up to see Ruth Macdonald! You know
they're related. If he is, that knocks my plans all into a cocked hat.
I'd have to sit at attention all the evening, and I couldn't propose with
that cad around!"

"Better put it off then and come with me," soothed his friend. "Athalie
Britt will help you forget your troubles all right, and there's plenty of
time. You'll get another leave soon."

"How the dickens did John Cameron come to be on speaking terms with
Captain La Rue, I'd like to know?" mused Wainwright, paying no heed to
his friend.

"H'm! That does complicate matters for you some, doesn't it? Captain La
Rue is down at your camp, isn't he? Why, I suppose Cameron knew him up at
college, perhaps. Cap used to come up from the university every week last
winter to lecture at college."

Wainwright muttered a chain of choice expletives known only to men of his
kind.

"Forget it!" encouraged his friend slapping him vigorously on the
shoulder as the train drew into Bryne Haven. "Come off that grouch and
get busy! You're on leave, man! If you can't visit one woman there's
plenty more, and time enough to get married, too, before you go to
France. Marriage is only an incident, anyway. Why make such a fuss about
it?"

By the fitful glare of the station lights they could see that Cameron was
walking with the captain just ahead of them in the attitude of familiar
converse. The sight did not put Wainwright into a better humor.

At the great gate of the Macdonald estate Cameron and La Rue parted. They
could hear the last words of their conversation as La Rue swung into the
wide driveway and Cameron started on up the street:

"I'll attend to it the first thing in the morning, Cameron, and I'm glad
you spoke to me about it! I don't see any reason why it shouldn't go
through! I shall be personally gratified if we can make the arrangement.
Good-night and good luck to you!"

The two young officers halted at a discreet distance until John Cameron
had turned off to the right and walked away into the darkness. The
captain's quick step could be heard crunching along the gravel drive to
the Macdonald house.

"Well, I guess that about settles me for the night, Bobbie!" sighed
Wainwright. "Come on, let's pass the time away somehow. I'll stop at the
drug store to 'phone and make a date with Ruth for to-morrow morning.
Wonder where I can get a car to take her out? No, I don't want to go in
her car because she always wants to run it herself. When you're proposing
to a woman you don't want her to be absorbed in running a car. See?"

"I don't know. I haven't so much experience in that line as you have,
Harry, but I should think it might be inconvenient," laughed the other.

They went back to the station. A few minutes later Wainwright emerged
from the telephone booth in the drug store with a lugubrious expression.

"Doggone my luck! She's promised to go to church with that smug cousin of
hers, and she's busy all the rest of the day. But she's promised to give
me next Saturday if I can get off!" His face brightened with the thought.

"I guess I can make it. If I can't do anything else I'll tell 'em I'm
going to be married, and then I can make her rush things through,
perhaps. Girls are game for that sort of thing just now; it's in the air,
these war marriages. By George, I'm not sure but that's the best way to
work it after all. She's the kind of a girl that would do almost anything
to help you out of a fix that way, and I'll just tell her I had to say
that to get off and that I'll be court-martialed if they find out it
wasn't so. How about it?"

"I don't know, Harry. It's all right, of course, if you can get away with
it, but Ruth's a pretty bright girl and has a will of her own, you know.
But now, come on. It's getting late. What do you say if we get up a party
and run down to Atlantic City over Sunday, now that you're free? I know
those two girls would be tickled to death to go, especially Athalie.
She's a Westerner, you know, and has never seen the ocean."

"All right, come on, only you must promise there won't be any scrapes
that will get me into the papers and blow back to Bryne Haven. You know
there's a lot of Bryne Haven people go to Atlantic City this time of year
and I'm not going to have any stories started. _I'm going to marry Ruth
Macdonald!_"

"All right. Come on."

Ruth Macdonald drew up her little electric runabout sharply at the
crossing, as the station gates suddenly clanged down in her way, and sat
back with a look of annoyance on her face.

Michael of the crossing was so overcareful sometimes that it became
trying. She was sure there was plenty of time to cross before the down
train. She glanced at her tiny wrist watch and frowned. Why, it was fully
five minutes before the train was due! What could Michael mean, standing
there with his flag so importantly and that determined look upon his
face?

She glanced down the platform and was surprised to find a crowd. There
must be a special expected. What was it? A convention of some sort? Or a
picnic? It was late in the season for picnics, and not quite soon enough
for a college football game. Who were they, anyway? She looked them over
and was astonished to find people of every class, the workers, the
wealthy, the plain every-day men, women and children, all with a waiting
attitude and a strange seriousness upon them. As she looked closer she
saw tears on some faces and handkerchiefs everywhere in evidence. Had
some one died? Was this a funeral train they were awaiting? Strange she
had not heard!

Then the band suddenly burst out upon her with the familiar wail:

There's a long, long trail awinding,
Into the land of our dreams,--

and behind came the muffled tramping of feet not accustomed to marching
together.

Ruth suddenly sat up very straight and began to watch, an unfamiliar awe
upon her. This must be the first draft men just going away! Of course!
Why had she not thought of it at once. She had read about their going and
heard people mention it the last week, but it had not entered much into
her thoughts. She had not realized that it would be a ceremony of public
interest like this. She had no friends whom it would touch. The young men
of her circle had all taken warning in plenty of time and found
themselves a commission somewhere, two of them having settled up matters
but a few days before. She had thought of these draft men, when she had
thought of them at all, only when she saw mention of them in the
newspapers, and then as a lot of workingmen or farmers' boys who were
reluctant to leave their homes and had to be forced into patriotism in
this way. It had not occurred to her that there were many honorable young
men who would take this way of putting themselves at the disposal of
their country in her time of need, without attempting to feather a nice
little nest for themselves. Now she watched them seriously and found to
her astonishment that she knew many of them. There were three college
fellows in the front ranks whom she had met. She had danced with them and
been taken out to supper by them, and had a calling acquaintance with
their sisters. The sister of one stood on the sidewalk now in the common
crowd, quite near to the runabout, and seemed to have forgotten that
anybody was by. Her face was drenched with tears and her lips were
quivering. Behind her was a gray-haired woman with a skewey blouse and a
faded dark blue serge skirt too long for the prevailing fashion. The
tears were trickling down her cheeks also; and an old man with a crutch,
and a little round-eyed girl, seemed to belong to the party. The old
man's lips were set and he was looking at the boys with his heart in his
eyes.

Ruth shrank back not to intrude upon such open sorrow, and glanced at the
line again as they straggled down the road to the platform; fifty
serious, grave-eyed young men with determined mien and sorrow in the very
droop of their shoulders. One could see how they hated all this publicity
and display, this tense moment of farewell in the eyes of the town; and
yet how tender they felt toward those dear ones who had gathered thus to
do them honor as they went away to do their part in the great
world-struggle for liberty.

As she looked closer the girl saw they were not mature men as at first
glance they had seemed, but most of them mere boys. There was the boy
that mowed the Macdonald lawn, and the yellow-haired grocery boy. There
was the gas man and the nice young plumber who fixed the leak in the
water pipes the other day, and the clerk from the post office, and the
cashier from the bank! What made them look so old at first sight? Why, it
was as if sorrow and responsibility had suddenly been put upon them like
a garment that morning for a uniform, and they walked in the shadow of
the great sadness that had come upon the world. She understood that
perhaps even up to the very day before, they had most of them been merry,
careless boys; but now they were men, made so in a night by the horrible
_sin_ that had brought about this thing called War.

For the first time since the war began Ruth Macdonald had a vision of
what the war meant. She had been knitting, of course, with all the rest;
she had spent long mornings at the Red Cross rooms--she was on her way
there this very minute when Michael and the procession had interrupted
her course--she had made miles of surgical dressings and picked tons of
oakum. She had bade her men friends cheery good-byes when they went to
Officers' Training Camps, and with the other girls welcomed and admired
their uniforms when they came home on short furloughs, one by one winning
his stripes and commission. They were all men whom she had known in
society. They had wealth and position and found it easy to get into the
kind of thing that pleased them in the army or navy. The danger they were
facing seemed hardly a negligible quantity. It was the fashion to look on
it that way. Ruth had never thought about it before. She had even been
severe in her judgment of a few mothers who worried about their sons and
wanted to get them exempt in some way. But these stern loyal mothers who
stood in close ranks with heavy lines of sacrifice upon their faces,
tears on their cheeks, love and self-abnegation in their eyes, gave her a
new view of the world. These were the ones who would be in actual
poverty, some of them, without their boys, and whose lives would be empty
indeed when they went forth. Ruth Macdonald had never before realized the
suffering this war was causing individuals until she saw the faces of
those women with their sons and brothers and lovers; until she saw the
faces of the brave boys, for the moment all the rollicking lightness
gone, and only the pain of parting and the mists of the unknown future in
their eyes.

It came to the girl with a sudden pang that she was left out of all this.
That really it made little difference to her whether America was in the
war or not. Her life would go on just the same--a pleasant monotony of
bustle and amusement. There would be the same round of social affairs and
regular engagements, spiced with the excitement of war work and
occasional visiting uniforms. There was no one going forth from their
home to fight whose going would put the light of life out for her and
cause her to feel sad, beyond the ordinary superficial sadness for the
absence of one's playmates.

She liked them all, her friends, and shrank from having them in danger;
although it was splendid to have them doing something real at last. In
truth until this moment the danger had seemed so remote; the casualty
list of which people spoke with bated breath so much a thing of vast
unknown numbers, that it had scarcely come within her realization as yet.
But now she suddenly read the truth in the suffering eyes of these people
who were met to say good-bye, perhaps a last good-bye, to those who were
dearer than life to them. How would she, Ruth Macdonald, feel, if one of
those boys were her brother or lover? It was inconceivably dreadful.

The band blared on, and the familiar words insisted themselves upon her
unwilling mind:

There's a long, long night of waiting!

A sob at her right made her start and then turn away quickly from the
sight of a mother's grief as she clung to a frail daughter for support,
sobbing with utter abandon, while the daughter kept begging her to "be
calm for Tom's sake."

It was all horrible! Why had she gotten into this situation? Aunt Rhoda
would blame her for it. Aunt Rhoda would say it was too conspicuous,
right there in the front ranks! She put her hand on the starter and
glanced out, hoping to be able to back out and get away, but the road
behind was blocked several deep with cars, and the crowd had closed in
upon her and about her on every side. Retreat was impossible. However,
she noticed with relief that the matter of being conspicuous need not
trouble her. Nobody was looking her way. All eyes were turned in one
direction, toward that straggling, determined line that wound up from the
Borough Hall, past the Post Office and Bank to the station where the Home
Guards stood uniformed, in open silent ranks doing honor to the boys who
were going to fight for them.

Ruth's eyes went reluctantly back to the marching line again. Somehow it
struck her that they would not have seemed so forlorn if they had worn
new trig uniforms, instead of rusty varied civilian clothes. They seemed
like an ill-prepared sacrifice passing in review. Then suddenly her gaze
was riveted upon a single figure, the last man in the procession,
marching alone, with uplifted head and a look of self-abnegation on his
strong young face. All at once something sharp seemed to slash through
her soul and hold her with a long quiver of pain and she sat looking
straight ahead staring with a kind of wild frenzy at John Cameron walking
alone at the end of the line.

She remembered him in her youngest school days, the imp of the grammar
school, with a twinkle in his eye and an irrepressible grin on his handsome
face. Nothing had ever daunted him and no punishment had ever stopped his
mischief. He never studied his lessons, yet he always seemed to know enough
to carry him through, and would sometimes burst out with astonishing
knowledge where others failed. But there was always that joke on his lips
and that wide delightful grin that made him the worshipped-afar of all the
little girls. He had dropped a rose on her desk once as he lounged late and
laughing to his seat after recess, apparently unaware that his teacher was
calling him to order. She could feel the thrill of her little childish
heart now as she realized that he had given the rose to her. The next term
she was sent to a private school and saw no more of him save an occasional
glimpse in passing him on the street, but she never had forgotten him; and
now and then she had heard little scraps of news about him. He was working
his way through college. He was on the football team and the baseball team.
She knew vaguely that his father had died and their money was gone, but
beyond that she had no knowledge of him. They had drifted apart. He was not
of her world, and gossip about him seldom came her way. He had long ago
ceased to look at her when they happened to pass on the street. He
doubtless had forgotten her, or thought she had forgotten him. Or, it might
even be that he did not wish to presume upon an acquaintance begun when she
was too young to have a choice of whom should be her friends. But the
memory of that rose had never quite faded from her heart even though she
had been but seven, and always she had looked after him when she chanced to
see him on the street with a kind of admiration and wonder. Now suddenly
she saw him in another light. The laugh was gone from his lips and the
twinkle from his eyes. He looked as he had looked the day he fought Chuck
Woodcock for tying a string across the sidewalk and tripping up the little
girls on the way to school. It came to her like a revelation that he was
going forth now in just such a way to fight the world-foe. In a way he was
going to fight for her. To make the world a safe place for girls such as
she! All the terrible stories of Belgium flashed across her mind, and she
was lifted on a great wave of gratitude to this boy friend of her babyhood
for going out to defend her!

All the rest of the straggling line of draft men were going out for the
same purpose perhaps, but it did not occur to her that they were anything
to her until she saw John Cameron. All those friends of her own world who
were training for officers, they, too, were going to fight in the same
way to defend the world, but she had not thought of it in that way
before. It took a sight of John Cameron's high bearing and serious face
to bring the knowledge to her mind.

She thought no longer of trying to get away. She seemed held to the spot
by a new insight into life. She could not take her eyes from the face of
the young man. She forgot that she was staying, forgot that she was
staring. She could no more control the swelling thoughts of horror that
surged over her and took possession of her than she could have controlled
a mob if it had suddenly swept down upon her.

The gates presently lifted silently to let the little procession pass
over to her side of the tracks, and within a few short minutes the
special train that was to bear the men away to camp came rattling up,
laden with other victims of the chance that sent some men on ahead to be
pioneers in the camps.

These were a noisy jolly bunch. Perhaps, having had their own sad
partings they were only trying to brace themselves against the scenes of
other partings through which they must pass all the way along the line.
They must be reminded of their own mothers and sisters and sweethearts.
Something of this Ruth Macdonald seemed to define to herself as, startled
and annoyed by the clamor of the strangers in the midst of the sacredness
of the moment, she turned to look at the crowding heads in the car
windows and caught the eye of an irrepressible youth:

"Think of me over there!" he shouted, waving a flippant hand and
twinkling his eyes at the beautiful girl in her car.

Another time Ruth would have resented such familiarity, but now something
touched her spirit with an inexpressible pity, and she let a tiny ripple
of a smile pass over her lovely face as her eyes traveled on down the
platform in search of the tall form of John Cameron. In the moment of the
oncoming train she had somehow lost sight of him. Ah! There he was
stooping over a little white haired woman, taking her tenderly in his
arms to kiss her. The girl's eyes lingered on him. His whole attitude was
such a revelation of the man the rollicking boy had become. It seemed to
pleasantly round out her thought of him.

The whistle sounded, the drafted men gave one last wringing hand-clasp,
one last look, and sprang on board.

John Cameron was the last to board the train. He stood on the lower step
of the last car as it began to move slowly. His hat was lifted, and he
stood with slightly lifted chin and eyes that looked as if they had
sounded the depths of all sadness and surrendered himself to whatever had
been decreed. There was settled sorrow in all the lines of his fine face.
Ruth was startled by the change in it; by the look of the boy in the man.
Had the war done that for him just in one short summer? Had it done that
for the thousands who were going to fight for her? And she was sitting in
her luxurious car with a bundle of wool at her feet, and presuming to
bear her part by mere knitting! Poor little useless woman that she was! A
thing to send a man forth from everything he counted dear or wanted to
do, into suffering and hardship--and _death_--perhaps! She shuddered as
she watched his face with its strong uplifted look, and its unutterable
sorrow. She had not thought he could look like that! Oh, he would be gay
to-morrow, like the rest, of course, with his merry jest and his
contagious grin, and making light of the serious business of war! He
would not be the boy he used to be without the ability to do that. But
she would never forget how he had looked in this farewell minute while he
was gazing his last on the life of his boyhood and being borne away into
a dubious future. She felt a hopelessly yearning, as if, had there been
time, she would have liked to have told him how much she appreciated his
doing this great deed for her and for all her sisters!

Has it ever been fully explained why the eyes of one person looking hard
across a crowd will draw the eyes of another?

The train had slipped along ten feet or more and was gaining speed when
John Cameron's eyes met those of Ruth Macdonald, and her vivid speaking
face flashed its message to his soul. A pleased wonder sprang into his
eyes, a question as his glance lingered, held by the tumult in her face,
and the unmistakable personality of her glance. Then his face lit up with
its old smile, graver, oh, much! and more deferential than it used to be,
with a certain courtliness in it that spoke of maturity of spirit. He
lifted his hat a little higher and waved it just a trifle in recognition
of her greeting, wondering in sudden confusion if he were really not
mistaken after all and had perhaps been appropriating a farewell that
belonged to someone else; then amazed and pleased at the flutter of her
handkerchief in reply.

The train was moving rapidly now in the midst of a deep throaty cheer
that sounded more like a sob, and still he stood on that bottom step with
his hat lifted and let his eyes linger on the slender girlish figure in
the car, with the morning sun glinting across her red-gold hair, and the
beautiful soft rose color in her cheeks.

As the train swept past the little shelter shed he bethought himself and
turned a farewell tender smile on the white-haired woman who stood
watching him through a mist of tears. Then his eyes went back for one
last glimpse of the girl; and so he flashed out of sight around the
curve.

III

It had taken only a short time after all. The crowd drowned its cheer in
one deep gasp of silence and broke up tearfully into little groups
beginning to melt away at the sound of Michael ringing up the gates, and
telling the cars and wagons to hurry that it was almost time for the
up-train.

Ruth Macdonald started her car and tried to bring her senses back to
their normal calm wondering what had happened to her and why there was
such an inexpressible mingling of loss and pleasure in her heart.

The way at first was intricate with congestion of traffic and Ruth was
obliged to go slowly. As the road cleared before her she was about to
glide forward and make up for lost time. Suddenly a bewildered little
woman with white hair darted in front of the car, hesitated, drew back,
came on again. Ruth stopped the car shortly, much shaken with the swift
vision of catastrophe, and the sudden recognition of the woman. It was
the same one who had been with John Cameron.

"Oh, I'm so sorry I startled you!" she called pleasantly, leaning out of
the car. "Won't you get in, please, and let me take you home?"

The woman looked up and there were great tears in her eyes. It was plain
why she had not seen where she was going.

"Thank you, no, I couldn't!" she said with a choke in her voice and
another blur of tears, "I--you see--I want to get away--I've been seeing
off my boy!"

"I know!" said Ruth with quick sympathy, "I saw. And you want to get home
quickly and cry. I feel that way myself. But you see I didn't have
anybody there and I'd like to do a little something just to be in it.
Won't you please get in? You'll get home sooner if I take you; and see!
We're blocking the way!"

The woman cast a frightened glance about and assented:

"Of course. I didn't realize!" she said climbing awkwardly in and sitting
bolt upright as uncomfortable as could be in the luxurious car beside the
girl. It was all too plain she did not wish to be there.

Ruth manoeuvred her car quickly out of the crowd and into a side street,
gliding from there to the avenue. She did not speak until they had left
the melting crowd well behind them. Then she turned timidly to the woman:

"You--are--his--_mother_?"

She spoke the words hesitatingly as if she feared to touch a wound. The
woman's eyes suddenly filled again and a curious little quiver came on
the strong chin.

"Yes," she tried to say and smothered the word in her handkerchief
pressed quickly to her lips in an effort to control them.

Ruth laid a cool little touch on the woman's other hand that lay in her
lap:

"Please forgive me!" she said, "I wasn't sure. I know it must be
awful,--cruel--for you!"

"He--is all I have left!" the woman breathed with a quick controlled
gasp, "but, of course--it was--right that he should go!"

She set her lips more firmly and blinked off at the blur of pretty homes
on her right without seeing any of them.

"He would have gone sooner, only he thought he ought not to leave me till
he had to," she said with another proud little quiver in her voice, as if
having once spoken she must go on and say more, "I kept telling him I
would get on all right--but he always was so careful of me--ever since
his father died!"

"Of course!" said Ruth tenderly turning her face away to struggle with a
strange smarting sensation in her own eyes and throat. Then in a low
voice she added:

"I knew him, you know. I used to go to the same school with him when I
was a little bit of a girl."

The woman looked up with a quick searching glance and brushed the tears
away firmly.

"Why, aren't you Ruth Macdonald? _Miss_ Macdonald, I mean--excuse me! You
live in the big house on the hill, don't you?"

"Yes, I'm Ruth Macdonald. Please don't call me Miss. I'm only nineteen
and I still answer to my little girl name," Ruth answered with a charming
smile.

The woman's gaze softened.

"I didn't know John knew you," she said speculatively. "He never
mentioned----"

"Of course not!" said the girl anticipating, "he wouldn't. It was a long
time ago when I was seven and I doubt if he remembers me any more. They
took me out of the public school the next year and sent me to St. Mary's
for which I've never quite forgiven them, for I'm sure I should have got
on much faster at the public school and I loved it. But I've not
forgotten the good times I had there, and John was always good to the
little girls. We all liked him. I haven't seen him much lately, but I
should think he would have grown to be just what you say he is. He looks
that way."

Again the woman's eyes searched her face, as if she questioned the
sincerity of her words; then apparently satisfied she turned away with a
sigh:

"I'd have liked him to know a girl like you," she said wistfully.

"Thank you!" said Ruth brightly, "that sounds like a real compliment.
Perhaps we shall know each other yet some day if fortune favors us. I'm
quite sure he's worth knowing."

"Oh, he is!" said the little mother, her tears brimming over again and
flowing down her dismayed cheeks, "he's quite worth the best society
there is, but I haven't been able to manage a lot of things for him. It
hasn't been always easy to get along since his father died. Something
happened to our money. But anyway, he got through college!" with a flash
of triumph in her eyes.

"Wasn't that fine!" said Ruth with sparkling eyes, "I'm sure he's worth a
lot more than some of the fellows who have always had every whim
gratified. Now, which street? You'll have to tell me. I'm ashamed to say
I don't know this part of town very well. Isn't it pretty down here? This
house? What a wonderful clematis! I never saw such a wealth of bloom."

"Yes, John planted that and fussed over it," said his mother with pride
as she slipped unaccustomedly out of the car to the sidewalk. "I'm very
glad to have met you and it was most kind of you to bring me home. To
tell the truth"--with a roguish smile that reminded Ruth of her son's
grin--"I was so weak and trembling with saying good-bye and trying to
keep up so John wouldn't know it, that I didn't know how I was to get
home. Though I'm afraid I was a bit discourteous. I couldn't bear the
thought of talking to a stranger just then. But you haven't been like a
stranger--knowing him, and all----"

"Oh, thank you!" said Ruth, "it's been so pleasant. Do you know, I don't
believe I ever realized what an awful thing the war is till I saw those
people down at the station this morning saying good-bye. I never realized
either what a useless thing I am. I haven't even anybody very dear to
send. I can only knit."

"Well, that's a good deal. Some of us haven't time to do that. I never
have a minute."

"You don't need to, you've given your son," said Ruth flashing a glance
of glorified understanding at the woman.

A beautiful smile came out on the tired sorrowful face.

"Yes, I've given him," she said, "but I'm hoping God will give him back
again some day. Do you think that's too much to hope. He is such a good
boy!"

"Of course not," said Ruth sharply with a sudden sting of apprehension in
her soul. And then she remembered that she had no very intimate
acquaintance with God. She wished she might be on speaking terms, at
least, and she would go and present a plea for this lonely woman. If it
were only Captain La Rue, her favorite cousin, or even the President, she
might consider it. But God! She shuddered. Didn't God let this awful war
be? Why did He do it? She had never thought much about God before.

"I wish you would let me come to see you sometime and take you for
another ride," she said sweetly.

"It would be beautiful!" said the older woman, "if you would care to take
the time from your own friends."

"I would love to have you for one of my friends," said the girl
gracefully.

The woman smiled wistfully.

"I'm only here holidays and evenings," she conceded, "I'm doing some
government work now."

"I shall come," said Ruth brightly. "I've enjoyed you ever so much." Then
she started her car and whirled away into the sunshine.

"She won't come, of course," said the woman to herself as she stood
looking mournfully after the car, reluctant to go into the empty house.
"I wish she would! Isn't she just like a flower! How wonderful it would
be if things had been different, and there hadn't been any war, and my
boy could have had her for a friend! Oh!"

* * * * *

Down at the Club House the women waited for the fair young member who had
charge of the wool. They rallied her joyously as she hurried in, suddenly
aware that she had kept them all waiting.

"I saw her in the crowd at the station this morning," called out Mrs.
Pryor, a large placid tease with a twinkle in her eye. "She was picking
out the handsomest man for the next sweater she knits. Which one did you
choose, Miss Ruth? Tell us. Are you going to write him a letter and stick
it in the toe of his sock?"

The annoyed color swept into Ruth's face, but she paid no other heed as
she went about her morning duties, preparing the wool to give out. A
thought had stolen into her heart that made a tumult there and would not
bear turning over even in her mind in the presence of all these curious
people. She put it resolutely by as she taught newcomers how to turn the
heel of a sock, but now and then it crept back again and was the cause of
her dropping an occasional stitch.

Dottie Wetherill came to find out what was the matter with her sock, and
to giggle and gurgle about her brother Bob and his friends. Bob, it
appeared, was going to bring five officers home with him next week end
and they were to have a dance Saturday night. Of course Ruth must come.
Bob was soon to get his _first_ lieutenant's commission. There had been a
mistake, of course, or he would have had it before this, some favoritism
shown; but now Bob had what they called a "pull," and things were going
to be all right for him. Bob said you couldn't get anywhere without a
"pull." And didn't Ruth think Bob looked perfectly fine in his uniform?

It annoyed Ruth to hear such talk and she tried to make it plain to
Dottie that she was mistaken about "pull." There was no such thing. It
was all imagination. She knew, for her cousin, Captain La Rue, was very
close to the Government and he had told her so. He said that real worth
was always recognized, and that it didn't make any difference where it
was found or who your friends were. It mattered _what you were_.

She fixed Dottie's sock and moved on to the wool table to get ready an
allotment for some of the ladies to take home.

Mrs. Wainwright bustled in, large and florid and well groomed, with a
bunch of photographer's proofs of her son Harry in his uniform. She
called loudly for Ruth to come and inspect them. There were some twenty
or more poses, each one seemingly fatter, more pompous and conceited
looking than the last. She stated in boisterous good humor that Harry
particularly wanted Ruth's opinion before he gave the order. At that Mrs.
Pryor bent her head to her neighbor and nodded meaningly, as if a certain
matter of discussion were settled now beyond all question. Ruth caught
the look and its meaning and the color flooded her face once more, much
to her annoyance. She wondered angrily if she would never be able to stop
that childish habit of blushing, and why it annoyed her so very much this
morning to have her name coupled with that of Harry Wainwright. He was
her old friend and playmate, having lived next door to her all her life,
and it was but natural when everybody was sweethearting and getting
married, that people should speak of her and wonder whether there might
be anything more to their relationship than mere friendship. Still it
annoyed her. Continually as she turned the pages from one fat smug
Wainwright countenance to another, she saw in a mist the face of another
man, with uplifted head and sorrowful eyes. She wondered if when the time
came for Harry Wainwright to go he would have aught of the vision, and
aught of the holiness of sorrow that had shown in that other face.

She handed the proofs back to the mother, so like her son in her ample
blandness, and wondered if Mrs. Cameron would have a picture of her son
in his uniform, fine and large and lifelike as these were.

She interrupted her thoughts to hear Mrs. Wainwright's clarion voice
lifted in parting from the door of the Club House on her way back to her
car:

"Well, good-bye, Ruth dear. Don't hesitate to let me know if you'd like
to have either of the other two large ones for your own 'specials,' you
know. I shan't mind changing the order a bit. Harry said you were to have
as many as you wanted. I'll hold the proofs for a day or two and let you
think it over."

Ruth lifted her eyes to see the gaze of every woman in the room upon her,
and for a moment she felt as if she almost hated poor fat doting Mamma
Wainwright. Then the humorous side of the moment came to help her and her
face blossomed into a smile as she jauntily replied:

"Oh, no, please don't bother, Mrs. Wainwright. I'm not going to paper the
wall with them. I have other friends, you know. I think your choice was
the best of them all."

Then as gaily as if she were not raging within her soul she turned to
help poor Dottie Wetherill who was hopelessly muddled about turning her
heel.

Dottie chattered on above the turmoil of her soul, and her words were as
tiny April showers sizzling on a red hot cannon. By and by she picked up
Dottie's dropped stitches. After all, what did such things matter when
there was _war_ and men were giving their _lives_!

"And Bob says he doubts if they ever get to France. He says he thinks the
war will be over before half the men get trained. He says, for his part,
he'd like the trip over after the submarines have been put out of
business. It would be something to tell about, don't you know? But Bob
thinks the war will be over soon. Don't you think so, Ruth?"

"I don't know what I think," said Ruth exasperated at the little
prattler. It seemed so awful for a girl with brains--or hadn't she
brains?--to chatter on interminably in that inane fashion about a matter
of such awful portent. And yet perhaps the child was only trying to cover
up her fears, for she all too evidently worshipped her brother.

Ruth was glad when at last the morning was over and one by one the women
gathered their belongings together and went home. She stayed longer than
the rest to put the work in order. When they were all gone she drove
around by the way of the post office and asked the old post master who
had been there for twenty years and knew everybody, if he could tell her
the address of the boys who had gone to camp that morning. He wrote it
down and she tucked it in her blouse saying she thought the Red Cross
would be sending them something soon. Then she drove thoughtfully away to
her beautiful sheltered home, where the thought of war hardly dared to
enter yet in any but a playful form. But somehow everything was changed
within the heart of Ruth Macdonald and she looked about on all the
familiar places with new eyes. What right had she to be living here in
all this luxury while over there men were dying every day that she might
live?

The sun shone blindly over the broad dusty drill-field. The men marched
and wheeled, about-faced and counter-marched in their new olive-drab
uniforms and thought of home--those that had any homes to think about.
Some who did not thought of a home that might have been if this war had
not happened.

There were times when their souls could rise to the great occasion and
their enthusiasm against the foe could carry them to all lengths of
joyful sacrifice, but this was not one of the times. It was a breathless
Indian summer morning, and the dust was inches thick. It rose like a soft
yellow mist over the mushroom city of forty thousand men, brought into
being at the command of a Nation's leader. Dust lay like a fine yellow
powder over everything. An approaching company looked like a cloud as it
drew near. One could scarcely see the men near by for the cloud of yellow
dust everywhere.

The water was bad this morning when every man was thirsty. It had been
boiled for safety and was served warm and tasted of disinfectants. The
breakfast had been oatmeal and salty bacon swimming in congealed grease.
The "boy" in the soldier's body was very low indeed that morning. The
"man" with his disillusioned eyes had come to the front. Of course this
was nothing like the hardships they would have to endure later, but it
was enough for the present to their unaccustomed minds, and harder
because they were doing nothing that seemed worth while--just marching
about and doing sordid duties when they were all eager for the fray and
to have it over with. They had begun to see that they were going to have
to learn to wait and be patient, to obey blindly; they--who never had
brooked commands from any one, most of them, not even from their own
parents. They had been free as air, and they had never been tied down to
certain company. Here they were all mixed up, college men and foreign
laborers, rich and poor, cultured and coarse, clean and defiled, and it
went pretty hard with them all. They had come, a bundle of prejudices and
wills, and they had first to learn that every prejudice they had been
born with or cultivated, must be given up or laid aside. They were not
their own. They belonged to a great machine. The great perfect conception
of the army as a whole had not yet dawned upon them. They were occupied
with unpleasant details in the first experimental stages. At first the
discomforts seemed to rise and obliterate even the great object for which
they had come, and discontent sat upon their faces.

Off beyond the drill-field whichever way they looked, there were barracks
the color of the dust, and long stark roads, new and rough, the color of
the barracks, with jitneys and trucks and men like ants crawling
furiously back and forth upon them all animated by the same great
necessity that had brought the men here. Even the sky seemed yellow like
the dust. The trees were gone except at the edges of the camp, cut down
to make way for more barracks, in even ranks like men.

Out beyond the barracks mimic trenches were being dug, and puppets hung
in long lines for mock enemies. There were skeleton bridges to cross,
walls to scale, embankments to jump over, and all, everything, was that
awful olive-drab color till the souls of the new-made soldiers cried out
within them for a touch of scarlet or green or blue to relieve the dreary
monotony. Sweat and dust and grime, weariness, homesickness, humbled
pride, these were the tales of the first days of those men gathered from
all quarters who were pioneers in the first camps.

Corporal Cameron marched his awkward squad back and forth, through all
the various manoeuvres, again and again, giving his orders in short,
sharp tones, his face set, his heart tortured with the thought of the
long months and years of this that might be before him. The world seemed
most unfriendly to him these days. Not that it had ever been over kind,
yet always before his native wit and happy temperament had been able to
buoy him up and carry him through hopefully. Now, however, hope seemed
gone. This war might last till he was too old to carry out any of his
dreams and pull himself out of the place where fortune had dropped him.
Gradually one thought had been shaping itself clearly out of the days he
had spent in camp. This life on earth was not all of existence. There
must be something bigger beyond. It wasn't sane and sensible to think
that any God would allow such waste of humanity as to let some suffer all
the way through with nothing beyond to compensate. There was a meaning to
the suffering. There must be. It must be a preparation for something
beyond, infinitely better and more worth while. What was it and how
should he learn the meaning of his own particular bit?

John Cameron had never thought about religion before in his life. He had
believed in a general way in a God, or thought he believed, and that a
book called the Bible told about Him and was the authentic place to learn
how to be good. The doubts of the age had not touched him because he had
never had any interest in them. In the ordinary course of events he might
never have thought about them in relation to himself until he came to
die--perhaps not then. In college he had been too much engrossed with
other things to listen to the arguments, or to be influenced by the
general atmosphere of unbelief. He had been a boy whose inner thoughts
were kept under lock and key, and who had lived his heart life absolutely
alone, although his rich wit and bubbling merriment had made him a
general favorite where pure fun among the fellows was going. He loved to
"rough house" as he called it, and his boyish pranks had always been the
talk of the town, the envied of the little boys; but no one knew his
real, serious thoughts. Not even his mother, strong and self-repressed
like himself, had known how to get down beneath the surface and commune
with him. Perhaps she was afraid or shy.

Now that he was really alone among all this mob of men of all sorts and
conditions, he had retired more and more into the inner sanctuary of self
and tried to think out the meaning of life. From the chaos that reigned
in his mind he presently selected a few things that he called "facts"
from which to work. These were "God, Hereafter, Death." These things he
must reckon with. He had been working on a wrong hypothesis all his life.
He had been trying to live for this world as if it were the end and aim
of existence, and now this war had come and this world had suddenly
melted into chaos. It appeared that he and thousands of others must
probably give up their part in this world before they had hardly tried
it, if they would set things right again for those that should come
after. But, even if he had lived out his ordinary years in peace and
success, and had all that life could give him, it would not have lasted
long, seventy years or so, and what were they after they were past? No,
there was something beyond or it all wouldn't have been made--this
universe with the carefully thought out details working harmoniously one
with another. It wouldn't have been worth while otherwise. There would
have been no reason for a heart life.

There were boys and men in the army who thought otherwise. Who had
accepted this life as being all. Among these were the ones who when they
found they were taken in the draft and must go to camp, had spent their
last three weeks of freedom drunk because they wanted to get all the
"fun" they could out of life that was left to them. They were the men who
were plunging into all the sin they could find before they went away to
fight because they felt they had but a little time to live and what did
it matter? But John Cameron was not one of these. His soul would not let
him alone until he had thought it all out, and he had come thus far with
these three facts, "God, Death, A Life Hereafter." He turned these over
in his mind for days and then he changed their order, "_Death, A Life
Hereafter, God_."

Death was the grim person he was going forth to meet one of these days or
months on the field of France or Italy, or somewhere "over there." He was
not to wait for Death to come and get him as had been the old order. This
was WAR and he was going out to challenge Death. He was convinced that
whether Death was a servant of God or the Devil, in some way it would
make a difference with his own personal life hereafter, how he met Death.
He was not satisfied with just meeting Death bravely, with the ardor of
patriotism in his breast, as he heard so many about him talk in these
days. That was well so far as it went, but it did not solve the mystery
of the future life nor make him sure how he would stand in that other
world to which Death stood ready to escort him presently. Death might be
victor over his body, but he wanted to be sure that Death should not also
kill that something within him which he felt must live forever. He turned
it over for days and came to the conclusion that the only one who could
help him was God. God was the beginning of it all. If there was a God He
must be available to help a soul in a time like this. There must be a way
to find God and get the secret of life, and so be ready to meet Death
that Death should not conquer anything but the body. How could one find
God? Had anybody ever found Him? Did anyone really _think_ they had found
Him? These were questions that beat in upon his soul day after day as he
drilled his men and went through the long hard hours of discipline, or
lay upon his straw tick at night while a hundred and fifty other men
about him slept.

His mother's secret attempts at religion had been too feeble and too
hidden in her own breast to have made much of an impression upon him. She
had only _hoped_ her faith was founded upon a rock. She had not _known_.
And so her buffeted soul had never given evidence to her son of hidden
holy refuge where he might flee with her in time of need.

Now and then the vision of a girl blurred across his thoughts
uncertainly, like a bright moth hovering in the distance whose shadow
fell across his dusty path. But it was far away and vague, and only a
glance in her eyes belonged to him. She was not of his world.

He looked up to the yellow sky through the yellow dust, and his soul
cried out to find the way to God before he had to meet Death, but the
heavens seemed like molten brass. Not that he was afraid of death with a
physical fear, but that his soul recoiled from being conquered by it and
he felt convinced that there was a way to meet it with a smile of
assurance if only he could find it out. He had read that people had met
it that way. Was it all their imagination? The mere illusion of a
fanatical brain? Well, he would try to find out God. He would put himself
in the places where God ought to be, and when he saw any indication that
God was there he would cry out until he made God hear him!

The day he came to that conclusion was Sunday and he went over to the
Y.M.C.A. Auditorium. They were having a Mary Pickford moving picture show
there. If he had happened to go at any time during the morning he might
have heard some fine sermons and perhaps have found the right man to help
him, but this was evening and the men were being amused.

He stood for a few moments and watched the pretty show. The sunlight on
Mary's beautiful hair, as it fell glimmering through the trees in the
picture reminded him of the red-gold lights on Ruth Macdonald's hair the
morning he left home, and with a sigh he turned away and walked to the
edge of camp where the woods were still standing.

Alone he looked up to the starry sky. Amusement was not what he wanted
now. He was in search of something vague and great that would satisfy,
and give him a reason for being and suffering and dying perhaps. He
called it God because he had no other name for it. Red-gold hair might be
for others but not for him. He might not take it where he would and he
would not take it where it lay easy to get. If he had been in the same
class with some other fellows he knew he would have wasted no time on
follies. He would have gone for the very highest, finest woman. But
there! What was the use! Besides, even if he had been--and he had
had--every joy of life here was but a passing show and must sometime come
to an end. And at the end would be this old problem. Sometime he would
have had to realize it, even if war had not come and brought the
revelation prematurely. What was it that he wanted? How could he find out
how to die? Where was God?

But the stars were high and cold and gave no answer, and the whispering
leaves, although they soothed him, sighed and gave no help.

The feeling was still with him next morning when the mail was
distributed. There would be nothing for him. His mother had written her
weekly letter and it had reached him the day before. He could expect
nothing for several days now. Other men were getting sheaves of letters.
How friendless he seemed among them all. One had a great chocolate cake
that a girl had sent him and the others were crowding around to get a
bit. It was doubtful if the laughing owner got more than a bite himself.
He might have been one of the group if he had chosen. They all liked him
well enough, although they knew him very little as yet, for he had kept
much to himself. But he turned sharply away from them and went out.
Somehow he was not in the mood for fun. He felt he must be growing morbid
but he could not throw it off that morning. It all seemed so hopeless,
the things he had tried to do in life and the slow progress he had made
upward; and now to have it all blocked by war!

None of the other fellows ever dreamed that he was lonely, big, husky,
handsome fellow that he was, with a continuous joke on his lips for those
he had chosen as associates, with an arm of iron and a jaw that set like
steel, grim and unmistakably brave. The awkward squad as they wrathfully
obeyed his stern orders would have told you he had no heart, the way he
worked them, and would not have believed that he was just plain homesick
and lonesome for some one to care for him.

He was not hungry that day when the dinner call came, and flung himself
down under a scrub oak outside the barracks while the others rushed in
with their mess kits ready for beans or whatever was provided for them.
He was glad that they were gone, glad that he might have the luxury of
being miserable all alone for a few minutes. He felt strangely as if he
were going to cry, and yet he didn't know what about. Perhaps he was
going to be sick. That would be horrible down in that half finished
hospital with hardly any equipment yet! He must brace up and put an end
to such softness. It was all in the idea anyway.

Then a great hand came down upon his shoulder with a mighty slap and he
flung himself bolt upright with a frown to find his comrade whose bunk
was next to his in the barracks. He towered over Cameron polishing his
tin plate with a vigor.

"What's the matter with you, you boob? There's roast beef and its good.
Cooky saved a piece for you. I told him you'd come. Go in and get it
quick! There's a letter for you, too, in the office. I'd have brought it
only I was afraid I would miss you. Here, take my mess kit and hurry!
There's some cracker-jack pickles, too, little sweet ones! Step lively,
or some one will swipe them all!"

Cameron arose, accepted his friend's dishes and sauntered into the mess
hall. The letter couldn't be very important. His mother had no time to
write again soon, and there was no one else. It was likely an
advertisement or a formal greeting from some of the organizations at
home. They did that about fortnightly, the Red Cross, the Woman's Club,
The Emergency Aid, The Fire Company. It was kind in them but he wasn't
keen about it just then. It could wait until he got his dinner. They
didn't have roast beef every day, and now that he thought about it he was
hungry.

He almost forgot the letter after dinner until a comrade reminded him,
handing over a thick delicately scented envelope with a silver crest on
the back. The boys got off their kidding about "the girl he'd left behind
him" and he answered with his old good-natured grin that made them love
him, letting them think he had all kinds of girls, for the dinner had
somewhat restored his spirits, but he crumpled the letter into his pocket
and got away into the woods to read it.

Deliberately he walked down the yellow road, up over the hill by the
signal corps tents, across Wig-Wag Park to the woods beyond, and sat down
on a log with his letter. He told himself that it was likely one of those
fool letters the fellows were getting all the time from silly girls who
were uniform-crazy. He wouldn't answer it, of course, and he felt a kind
of contempt with himself for being weak enough to read it even to satisfy
his curiosity.

Then he tore open the envelope half angrily and a faint whiff of violets
floated out to him. Over his head a meadow lark trilled a long sweet
measure, and glad surprise suddenly entered into his soul.

The letter was written in a fine beautiful hand and even before he saw
the silver monogram at the top, he knew who was the writer, though he did
not even remember to have seen the writing before:

MY DEAR FRIEND:

I have hesitated a long time before writing because I do not know that I
have the right to call you a friend, or even an acquaintance in the
commonly accepted sense of that term. It is so long since you and I went
to school together, and we have been so widely separated since then that
perhaps you do not even remember me, and may consider my letter an
intrusion. I hope not, for I should hate to rank with the girls who are
writing to strangers under the license of mistaken patriotism.

My reason for writing you is that a good many years ago you did something
very nice and kind for me one day, in fact you helped me twice, although
I don't suppose you knew it. Then the other day, when you were going to
camp and I sat in my car and watched you, it suddenly came over me that
you were doing it again; this time a great big wonderful thing for me;
and doing it just as quietly and inconsequentially as you did it before;
and all at once I realized how splendid it was and wanted to thank you.

It came over me, too, that I had never thanked you for the other times,
and very likely you never dreamed that you had done anything at all.

You see I was only a little girl, very much frightened, because Chuck
Woodcock had teased me about my curls and said that he was going to catch
me and cut them off, and send me home to my aunt that way, and she would
turn me out of the house. He had been frightening me for several days, so
that I was afraid to go to school alone, and yet I would not tell my aunt
because I was afraid she would take me away from the Public School and
send me to a Private School which I did not want. But that day I had seen
Chuck Woodcock steal in behind the hedge, ahead of the girls. The others
were ahead of me and I was all out of breath--running to catch up because
I was afraid to pass him alone; and just as I got near two of them,--Mary
Wurts and Caroline Meadows, you remember them, don't you?--they gave a
scream and pitched headlong on the sidewalk. They had tripped over a wire
he had stretched from the tree to the hedge. I stopped short and got
behind a tree, and I remember how the tears felt in my throat, but I was
afraid to let them out because Chuck would call me a crybaby and I hated
that. And just then you came along behind me and jumped through the hedge
and caught Chuck and gave him an awful whipping. "Licking" I believe we
called it then. I remember how condemned I felt as I ran by the hedge and
knew in my heart that I was glad you were hurting him because he had been
so cruel to me. He used to pull my curls whenever he sat behind me in
recitation.

I remember you came in to school late with your hair all mussed up
beautifully, and a big tear in your coat, and a streak of mud on your
face. I was so worried lest the teacher would find out you had been
fighting and make you stay after school. Because you see I knew in my
heart that you had been winning a battle for me, and if anybody had to
stay after school I wished it could be me because of what you had done
for me. But you came in laughing as you always did, and looking as if
nothing in the world unusual had happened, and when you passed my desk
you threw before me the loveliest pink rose bud I ever saw. That was the
second thing you did for me.

Perhaps you won't understand how nice that was, either, for you see you
didn't know how unhappy I had been. The girls hadn't been very friendly
with me. They told me I was "stuck up," and they said I was too young to
be in their classes anyway and ought to go to Kindergarten. It was all
very hard for me because I longed to be big and have them for my friends.
I was very lonely in that great big house with only my aunt and
grandfather for company. But the girls wouldn't be friends at all until
they saw you give me that rose, and that turned the tide. They were crazy
about you, every one of them, and, they made up to me after that and told
me their secrets and shared their lunch and we had great times. And it
was all because you gave me the rose that day. The rose itself was lovely
and I was tremendously happy over it for its own sake, but it meant a
whole lot to me besides, and opened the little world of school to my
longing feet. I always wanted to thank you for it, but you looked as if
you didn't want me to, so I never dared; and lately I wasn't quite sure
you knew me, because you never looked my way any more.

But when I saw you standing on the platform the other day with the other
drafted men, it all came over me how you were giving up the life you had
planned to go out and fight for me and other girls like me. I hadn't
thought of the war that way before, although, of course, I had heard that
thought expressed in speeches; but it never struck into my heart until I
saw the look on your face. It was a kind of "knightliness," if there is
such a word, and when I thought about it I realized it was the very same
look you had worn when you burst through the hedge after Chuck Woodcock,
and again when you came back and threw that rose on my desk. Although,
you had a big, broad boy's-grin on your face then, and were chewing gum I
remember quite distinctly; and the other day you looked so serious and
sorry as if it meant a great deal to you to go, but you were giving up
everything gladly without even thinking of hesitating. The look on your
face was a man's look, not a boy's.

It has meant so much to me to realize this last great thing that you are
doing for me and for the other girls of our country that I had to write
and tell you how much I appreciate it.

I have been wondering whether some one has been knitting you a sweater
yet, and the other things that they knit for soldiers; and if they
haven't, whether you would let me send them to you? It is the only thing
I can do for you who have done so much for me.

I hope you will not think I am presuming to have written this on the
strength of a childish acquaintance. I wish you all honors that can come
to you on such a quest as yours, and I had almost said all good luck,
only that that word sounds too frivolous and pagan for such a serious
matter; so I will say all safety for a swift accomplishment of your task
and a swift homecoming. I used to think when I was a little child that
nothing could ever hurt you or make you afraid, and I cannot help feeling
now that you will come through the fire unscathed. May I hope to hear
from you about the sweater and things? And may I sign myself

Your friend?

RUTH MACDONALD.

John Cameron lifted his eyes from the paper at last and looked up at the
sky. Had it ever been so blue before? At the trees. What whispering
wonders of living green! Was that only a bird that was singing that
heavenly song--a meadow lark, not an angel? Why had he never appreciated
meadow larks before?

He rested his head back against a big oak and his soldier's hat fell off
on the ground. He closed his eyes and the burden of loneliness that had
borne down upon him all these weeks in the camp lifted from his heart.
Then he tried to realize what had come to him. Ruth Macdonald, the wonder
and admiration of his childhood days, the admired and envied of the home
town, the petted beauty at whose feet every man fell, the girl who had
everything that wealth could purchase! She had remembered the little old
rose he had dared to throw on her desk, and had bridged the years with
this letter!

He was carried back in spirit to the day he left for camp. To the look in
her eyes as he moved away on the train. The look had been real then, and
not just a fleeting glance helped out by his fevered imagination. There
had been true friendliness in her eyes. She had intended to say good-bye
to him! She had put him on a level with her own beautiful self. She had
knighted him, as it were, and sent him forth! Even the war had become
different since she chose to think he was going forth to fight her
battles. What a sacred trust!

Afar in the distance a bugle sounded that called to duty. He had no idea
how the time had flown. He glanced at his wrist watch and was amazed. He
sprang to his feet and strode over the ground, but the way no longer
seemed dusty and blinded with sunshine. It shone like a path of glory
before his willing feet, and he went to his afternoon round of duties
like a new man. He had a friend, a real friend, one that he had known a
long time. There was no fear that she was just writing to him to get one
more soldier at her feet as some girls would have done. Her letter was
too frank and sincere to leave a single doubt about what she meant. He
would take her at her word.

Sometime during the course of the afternoon it occurred to him to look at
the date of the letter, and he found to his dismay that it had been
written nearly four weeks before and had been travelling around through
various departments in search of him, because it had not the correct
address. He readily guessed that she had not wanted to ask for his
company and barracks; she would not have known who to ask. She did not
know his mother, and who else was there? His old companions were mostly
gone to France or camp somewhere.

And now, since all this time had elapsed she would think he had not
cared, had scorned her letter or thought it unmaidenly! He was filled
with dismay and anxiety lest he had hurt her frankness by his seeming
indifference. And the knitted things, the wonderful things that she had
made with her fair hands! Would she have given them to some one else by
this time? Of course, it meant little to her save as a kind of
acknowledgment for something she thought he had done for her as a child,
but they meant so much to him! Much more than they ought to do, he knew,
for he was in no position to allow himself to become deeply attached to
even the handiwork of any girl in her position. However, nobody need ever
know how much he cared, had always cared, for the lovely little girl with
her blue eyes, her long curls, her shy sweet smile and modest ways, who
had seemed to him like an angel from heaven when he was a boy. She had
said he did not know that he was helping her when he burst through the
hedge on the cowering Chuck Woodcock; and he would likely never dare to
tell her that it was because he saw her fright and saw her hide behind
that tree that he went to investigate and so was able to administer a
just punishment. He had picked that rose from the extreme west corner of
a great petted rose bush on the Wainwright lawn, reaching through an
elaborate iron fence to get it as he went cross-lots back to school. He
would call it stealing now to do that same, but then it had been in the
nature of a holy rite offered to a vestal virgin. Yet he must have cast
it down with the grin of an imp, boorish urchin that he was; and he
remembered blushing hotly in the dark afterwards at his presumption, as
he thought of it alone at night. And all the time she had been liking it.
The little girl--the little sweet girl! She had kept it in her heart and
remembered it!

His heart was light as air as he went back to the barracks for retreat. A
miracle had been wrought for him which changed everything. No, he was not
presuming on a friendly letter. Maybe there would be fellows who would
think there wasn't much in just a friendly letter to a lonely soldier,
and a sweater or two more or less. But then they would never have known
what it was to be so lonely for friendship, real friendship, as he was.

He would hurry through supper and get to the Y.M.C.A. hut to write her an
answer. He would explain how the letter had been delayed and say he hoped
she had not given the things away to someone else. He began planning
sentences as he stood at attention during the captain's inspection at
retreat. Somehow the captain was tiresomely particular about the buttons
and pocket flaps and little details to-night. He waited impatiently for
the command to break ranks, and was one of the first at the door of the
mess hall waiting for supper, his face alight, still planning what he
would say in that letter and wishing he could get some fine stationery to
write upon; wondering if there was any to be had with his caduces on it.

At supper he bubbled with merriment. An old schoolmate might have thought
him rejuvenated. He wore his schoolboy grin and rattled off puns and
jokes, keeping the mess hall in a perfect roar.

At last he was out in the cool of the evening with the wonderful sunset
off in the west, on his way to the Y.M.C.A. hut. He turned a corner
swinging into the main road and there, coming toward him, not twenty feet
away, he saw Lieutenant Wainwright!

There was no possible way to avoid meeting him. John Cameron knew that
with the first glance. He also knew that Wainwright had recognized him at
once and was lifting his chin already with that peculiar, disagreeable
tilt of triumph that had always been so maddening to one who knew the
small mean nature of the man.

Of course, there was still time to turn deliberately about and flee in
the other direction, but that would be all too obvious, and an open
confession of weakness. John Cameron was never at any time a coward.

His firm lips set a trifle more sternly than usual, his handsome head was
held high with fine military bearing. He came forward without faltering
for even so much as the fraction of a waver. There was not a flicker in
his eyes set straight ahead. One would never have known from his looks
that he recognized the oncoming man, or had so much as realized that an
officer was approaching, yet his brain was doing some rapid calculation.
He had said in his heart if not openly that he would never salute this
man. He had many times in their home town openly passed him without
salute because he had absolutely no respect for him, and felt that he
owed it to his sense of the fitness of things not to give him deference,
but that was a different matter from camp. He knew that Wainwright was in
a position to do him injury, and no longer stood in fear of a good
thrashing from him as at home, because here he could easily have the
offender put in the guard house and disgraced forever. Nothing, of
course, would delight him more than thus to humiliate his sworn enemy.
Yet Cameron walked on knowing that he had resolved not to salute him.

It was not merely pride in his own superiority. It was contempt for the
nature of the man, for his low contemptible plots and tricks, and cunning
ways, for his entire lack of principle, and his utter selfishness and
heartlessness, that made Cameron feel justified in his attitude toward
Wainwright. "He is nothing but a Hun at heart," he told himself bitterly.

But the tables were turned. Wainwright was no longer in his home town
where his detestable pranks had goaded many of his neighbors and
fellowtownsmen into a cordial hatred of him. He was in a great military
camp, vested with a certain amount of authority, with the right to report
those under him; who in turn could not retaliate by telling what they
knew of him because it was a court-martial offense for a private to
report an officer. Well, naturally the United States was not supposed to
have put men in authority who needed reporting. Cameron, of course,
realized that these things had to be in order to maintain military
discipline. But it was inevitable that some unworthy ones should creep
in, and Wainwright was surely one of those unworthy ones. He would not
bend to him, officer, or no officer. What did he care what happened to
himself? Who was there to care but his mother? And she would understand
if the news should happen to penetrate to the home town, which was hardly
likely. Those who knew him would not doubt him, those who did not
mattered little. There was really no one who would care. Stay! A letter
crackled in his breast pocket and a cold chill of horror struggled up
from his heart. Suppose _she_ should hear of it! Yes, he would care for
that!

They were almost meeting now and Cameron's eyes were straight ahead
staring hard at the big green shape of the theatre a quarter of a mile
away. His face under its usual control showed no sign of the tumult in
his heart, which flamed with a sudden despair against a fate that had
placed him in such a desperate situation. If there were a just power who
controlled the affairs of men, how could it let such things happen to one
who had always tried to live up upright life? It seemed for that instant
as if all the unfairness and injustice of his own hard life had
culminated in that one moment when he would have to do or not do and bear
the consequences.

Then suddenly out from the barracks close at hand with brisk step and
noble bearing came Captain La Rue, swinging down the walk into the road
straight between the two men and stopped short in front of Cameron with a
light of real welcome in his eyes, as he lifted his hand to answer the
salute which the relieved Cameron instantly flashed at him.

In that second Lieutenant Wainwright flung past them with a curt salute
to the higher officer and a glare at the corporal which the latter seemed
not to see. It was so simultaneous with Cameron's salute of La Rue that
nobody on earth could say that the salute had not included the
lieutenant, yet both the lieutenant and the corporal knew that it had
not; and Wainwright's brow was dark with intention as he turned sharply
up the walk to the barracks which the captain had just left.

"I was just coming in search of you, Cameron," said the captain with a
twinkle in his eyes, and his voice was clearly distinct to Wainwright as
he loitered in the barracks doorway to listen, "I went down to Washington
yesterday and put in the strongest plea I knew how for your transfer. I
hope it will go through all right. There is no one else out for the job
and you are just the man for the place. It will be a great comfort to
have you with me."

A few more words and the busy man moved on eluding Cameron's earnest
thanks and leaving him to pursue his course to the Y.M.C.A. hut with a
sense of soothing and comfort. It never occurred to either of them that
their brief conversation had been overheard, and would not have disturbed
them if it had.

Lieutenant Wainwright lingered on the steps of the barracks with a
growing curiosity and satisfaction. The enemy were playing right into his
hands: _both_ the enemy--for he hated Captain La Rue as sin always hates
the light.

He lounged about the barracks in deep thought for a few minutes and then
made a careful toilet and went out.

He knew exactly where to go and how to use his influence, which was not
small, although not personal. It was characteristic of the man that it
made no difference to him that the power he was wielding was a borrowed
power whose owner would have been the last man to have done what he was
about to do with it. He had never in his life hesitated about getting
whatever he wanted by whatever means presented itself. He was often aware
that people gave him what he wanted merely to get rid of him, but this
did not alloy his pleasure in his achievement.

He was something of a privileged character in the high place to which he
betook himself, on account of the supreme regard which was held for the
uncle, a mighty automobile king, through whose influence he had obtained
his commission. So far he had not availed himself of his privileges too
often and had therefore not as yet outworn his welcome, for he was a true
diplomat. He entered this evening with just the right shade of delicate
assurance and humble affrontery to assure him a cordial welcome, and
gracefully settled himself into the friendliness that was readily
extended to him. He was versed in all the ways of the world and when he
chose could put up a good appearance. He knew that for the sake of his
father's family and more especially because of his uncle's high standing,
this great official whom he was calling upon was bound to be nice to him
for a time. So he bided his time till a few other officials had left and
his turn came.

The talk was all personal, a few words about his relatives and then
questions about himself, his commission, how he liked it, and how things
were going with him. Mere form and courtesy, but he knew how to use the
conversation for his own ends:

"Oh, I'm getting along fine and dandy!" he declared effusively, "I'm just
crazy about camp! I like the life! But I'll tell you what makes me tired.
It's these little common guys running around fussing about their jobs and
trying to get a lot of pull to get into some other place. Now there's an
instance of that in our company, a man from my home town, no account
whatever and never was, but he's got it in his head that he's a square
peg in a round hole and he wants to be transferred. He shouts about it
from morning till night trying to get everybody to help him, and at last
I understand he's hoodwinked one captain into thinking he's the salt of
the earth, and they are plotting together to get him transferred. I
happened to overhear them talking about it just now, how they are going
to this one and that one in Washington to get things fixed to suit them.
They think they've got the right dope on things all right and it's going
through for him to get his transfer. It makes me sick. He's no more fit
for a commission than my dog, not as fit, for he could at least obey
orders. This fellow never did anything but what he pleased. I've known
him since we were kids and never liked him. But he has a way with him
that gets people till they understand him. It's too bad when the country
needs real men to do their duty that a fellow like that can get a
commission when he is utterly inefficient besides being a regular breeder
of trouble. But, of course, I can't tell anybody what I know about him."

"I guess you needn't worry, Wainwright. They can't make any transfers
without sending them up to me, and you may be good and sure I'm not
transferring anybody just now without a good reason, no matter who is
asking it. He's in your company, is he? And where does he ask to be
transferred? Just give me his name. I'll make a note of it. If it ever
comes up I'll know how to finish him pretty suddenly. Though I doubt if
it does. People are not pulling wires just now. This is _war_ and
everything means business. However, if I find there has been wire-pulling
I shall know how to deal with it summarily. It's a court-martial offense,
you know."

They passed on to other topics, and Wainwright with his little eyes
gleaming triumphantly soon took himself out into the starlight knowing
that he had done fifteen minutes' good work and not wishing to outdo it.
He strolled contentedly back to officers' quarters wearing a more
complacent look on his heavy features. He would teach John Cameron to
ignore him!

Meantime John Cameron with his head among the stars walked the dusty camp
streets and forgot the existence of Lieutenant Wainwright. A glow of
gratitude had flooded his soul at sight of his beloved captain, whom he
hoped soon to be able to call _his_ captain. Unconsciously he walked with
more self-respect as the words of confidence and trust rang over again in
his ears. Unconsciously the little matters of personal enmity became
smaller, of less importance, beside the greater things of life in which
he hoped soon to have a real part. If he got this transfer it meant a
chance to work with a great man in a great way that would not only help
the war but would be of great value to him in this world after the war
was over. It was good to have the friendship of a man like that, fine,
clean, strong, intellectual, kind, just, human, gentle as a woman, yet
stern against all who deviated from the path of right.

The dusk was settling into evening and twinkling lights gloomed out amid
the misty, dust-laden air. Snatches of wild song chorused out from open
windows:

She's my lady, my baby,
She's cock-eyed, she's crazy.

The twang of a banjo trailed in above the voices, with a sound of
scuffling. Loud laughter broke the thread of the song leaving _"Mary
Ann!"_ to soar out alone. Then the chorus took it up once more:

All her teeth are false
From eating Rochelle salts--
She's my freckled-faced, consumptive MARY ANN-N-N!

Cameron turned in at the quiet haven of the Y.M.C.A. hut, glad to leave
the babel sounds outside. Somehow they did not fit his mood to-night,
although there were times when he could roar the outlandish gibberish
with the best of them. But to-night he was on such a wonderful sacred
errand bent, that it seemed as though he wanted to keep his soul from
contact with rougher things lest somehow it might get out of tune and so
unfit him for the task before him.

And then when he had seated himself before the simple desk he looked at
the paper with discontent. True, it was all that was provided and it was
good enough for ordinary letters, but this letter to her was different.
He wished he had something better. To think he was really writing to
_her_! And now that he was here with the paper before him what was he to
say? Words seemed to have deserted him. How should he address her?

It was not until he had edged over to the end of the bench away from
everybody else and taken out the precious letter that he gained
confidence and took up his pen:

"My dear friend:----" Why, he would call her his friend, of course, that
was what she had called him. And as he wrote he seemed to see her again
as she sat in her car by the station the day he started on his long, long
trail and their eyes had met. Looking so into her eyes again, he wrote
straight from his soul:

MY DEAR FRIEND:

Your letter has just reached me after travelling about for weeks. I am
not going to try to tell you how wonderful it is to me to have it. In
fact, the wonder began that morning I left home when you smiled at me and
waved a friendly farewell. It was a great surprise to me. I had not
supposed until that moment that you remembered my existence. Why should
you? And it has never been from lack of desire to do so that I failed to
greet you when we passed in the street. I did not think that I, a mere
little hoodlum from your infant days, had a right to intrude upon your
grown-up acquaintance without a hint from you that such recognition would
be agreeable. I never blamed you for not speaking of course. Perhaps I
didn't give you the chance. I simply thought I had grown out of your
memory as was altogether natural. It was indeed a pleasant experience to
see that light of friendliness in your eyes at the station that day, and
to know it was a real personal recognition and not just a patriotic gush
of enthusiasm for the whole shabby lot of us draftees starting out to an
unknown future. I thanked you in my heart for that little bit of personal
friendliness but I never expected to have an opportunity to thank you in
words, nor to have the friendliness last after I had gone away. When your
letter came this morning it sure was some pleasant surprise. I know you
have a great many friends, and plenty of people to write letters to, but
somehow there was a real note of comradeship in the one you wrote me, not
as if you just felt sorry for me because I had to go off to war and fight
and maybe get killed. It was as if the conditions of the times had
suddenly swept away a lot of foolish conventions of the world, which may
all have their good use perhaps at times, but at a time like this are
superfluous, and you had just gravely and sweetly offered me an old
friend's sympathy and good will. As such I have taken it and am rejoicing
in it.

Don't make any mistake about this, however. I never have forgotten you or
the rose! I stole it from the Wainwright's yard after I got done licking
Chuck, and I had a fight with Hal Wainwright over it which almost
finished the rose, and nearly got me expelled from school before I got
through with it. Hal told his mother and she took it to the school board.
I was a pretty tough little rascal in those days I guess and no doubt
needed some lickings myself occasionally. But I remember I almost lost my
nerve when I got back to school that day and came within an ace of
stuffing the rose in my pocket instead of throwing it on your desk. I
never dreamed the rose would be anything to you. It was only my way of
paying tribute to you. You seemed to me something like a rose yourself,
just dropped down out of heaven you know, you were so little and pink and
gold with such great blue eyes. Pardon me. I don't mean to be too
personal. You don't mind a big hobbledehoy's admiration, do you? You were
only a baby; but I would have licked any boy in town that lifted a word
or a finger against you. And to think you really needed my help! It
certainly would have lifted me above the clouds to have known it then!

And now about this war business. Of course it is a rough job, and
somebody had to do it for the world. I was glad and willing to do my
part; but it makes a different thing out of it to be called a knight, and
I guess I'll look at it a little more respectfully now. If a life like
mine can protect a life like yours from some of the things those Germans
are putting over I'll gladly give it. I've sized it up that a man
couldn't do a bigger thing for the world anyhow he planned it than to
make the world safe for a life like yours; so me for what they call "the
supreme sacrifice," and it won't be any sacrifice at all if it helps you!

No, I haven't got a sweater or those other things that go with those that
you talk about. Mother hasn't time to knit and I never was much of a
lady's man, I guess you know if you know me at all. Or perhaps you don't.
But anyhow I'd be wonderfully pleased to wear a sweater that you knit,
although it seems a pretty big thing for you to do for me. However, if
knitting is your job in this war, and I wouldn't be robbing any other
better fellow, I certainly would just love to have it.

If you could see this big dusty monotonous olive-drab camp you would know
what a bright spot your letter and the thought of a real friend has made
in it. I suppose you have been thinking all this time that I was
neglectful because I didn't answer, but it was all the fault of someone
who gave you the wrong address. I am hoping you will forgive me for the
delay and that some day you will have time to write to me again.

Sincerely and proudly,

Your knight,

JOHN CAMERON.

As he walked back to his barracks in the starlight his heart was filled
with a great peace. What a thing it was to have been able to speak to her
on paper and let her know his thoughts of her. It was as if after all
these years he had been able to pluck another trifling rose and lay it at
her lovely feet. Her knight! It was the fulfillment of all his boyish
dreams!

He had entrusted his letter to the Y.M.C.A. man to mail as he was going
out of camp that night and would mail it in Baltimore, ensuring it an
immediate start. Now he began to speculate whether it would reach its
destination by morning and be delivered with the morning mail. He felt as
excited and impatient as a child over it.

Suddenly a voice above him in a barracks window rang out with a familiar
guffaw, and the words:

"Why, man, I can't! Didn't I tell you I'm going to marry Ruth Macdonald
before I go! There wouldn't be time for that and the other, too!"

Something in his heart grew cold with pain and horror, and something in
his motive power stopped suddenly and halted his feet on the sidewalk in
the grade cut below the officers' barracks.

"Aw! A week more won't make any difference," drawled another familiar
voice, "I say, Hal, she's just crazy about you and you could get no end
of information out of her if you tried. All she asks is that you tell
what you know about a few little things that don't matter anyway."

"But I tell you I can't, man. If Ruth found out about the girl the
mischief would be to pay. She wouldn't stand for another girl--not that
kind of a girl, you know, and there wouldn't be time for me to explain
and smooth things over before I go across the Pond. I tell you I've made
up my mind about this."

The barracks door slammed shut on the voices and Corporal Cameron's heart
gave a great jump upwards in his breast and went on. Slowly, dizzily he
came to his senses and moved on automatically toward his own quarters.

VII

He had passed the quarters of the signal corps before the thought of the
letter he had just written came to his mind. Then he stopped short, gave
one agonizing glance toward his barracks only a few feet away, realized
that it was nearly time for bed call and that he could not possibly make
it if he went back, then whirled about and started out on a wild run like
a madman over the ground he had just traveled. He was not conscious of
carrying on a train of thought as he ran, his only idea was to get to the
Y.M.C.A. hut before the man had left with the letter. Never should his
childhood's enemy have that letter to sneer over!

All the pleasant phrases which had flowed from his pen so easily but a
few moments before seemed to flare now in letters of fire before his
blood-shot eyes as he bounded over the ground. To think he should have
lowered himself and weakened his position so, as to write to the girl who
was soon to be the wife of that contemptible puppy!

The bugles began to sound taps here and there in the barracks as he flew
past, but they meant nothing to him. Breathless he arrived at the
Y.M.C.A. hut just as the last light was being put out. A dark figure
stood on the steps as he halted entirely winded, and tried to gasp out:
"Where is Mr. Hathaway?" to the assistant who was locking up.

"Oh, he left five minutes after you did," said the man with a yawn. "The
rector came by in his car and took him along. Say, you'll be late getting
in, Corporal, taps sounded almost five minutes ago."

With a low exclamation of disgust and dismay Cameron turned and started
back again in a long swinging stride, his face flushing hotly in the dark
over his double predicament. He had gone back for nothing and got himself
subject to a calling down, a thing which he had avoided scrupulously
since coming to camp, but he was so miserable over the other matter that
it seemed a thing of no moment to him now. He was altogether occupied
with metaphorically kicking himself for having answered that letter; for
having mailed it so soon without ever stopping to read it over or give
himself a chance to reconsider. He might have known, he might have
remembered that Ruth Macdonald was no comrade for him; that she was a
neighbor of the Wainwright's and would in all probability be a friend of
the lieutenant's. Not for all that he owned in the world or hoped to own,
would he have thus laid himself open to the possibility of having
Wainwright know any of his inner thoughts. He would rather have lived and
died unknown, unfriended, than that this should come to pass.

And she? The promised wife of Wainwright! Could it be? She must have
written him that letter merely from a fine friendly patronage. All right,
of course, from her standpoint, but from his, gall and wormwood to his
proud spirit. Oh, that he had not answered it! He might have known! He
should have remembered that she had never been in his class. Not that his
people were not as good as hers, and maybe better, so far as intellectual
attainments were concerned; but his had lost their money, had lived a
quiet life, and in her eyes and the eyes of her family were very likely
as the mere dust of the earth. And now, just now when war had set its
seal of sacrifice upon all young men in uniform, he as a soldier had
risen to a kind of deified class set apart for hero worship, nothing
more. It was not her fault that she had been brought up that way, and
that he seemed so to her, and nothing more. She had shown her beautiful
spirit in giving him the tribute that seemed worthiest to her view. He
would not blame her, nor despise her, but he would hold himself aloof as
he had done in the past, and show her that he wanted no favors, no
patronage. He was sufficient to himself. What galled him most was to
think that perhaps in the intimacy of their engagement she might show his
letter to Wainwright, and they would laugh together over him, a poor
soldier, presuming to write as he had done to a girl in her station. They
would laugh together, half pitifully--at least the woman would be
pitiful, the man was likely to sneer. He could see his hateful mustache
curl now with scorn and his little eyes twinkle. And he would tell her
all the lies he had tried to put upon him in the past. He would give her
a wrong idea of his character. He would rejoice and triumph to do so! Oh,
the bitterness of it! It overwhelmed him so that the little matter of
getting into his bunk without being seen by the officer in charge was
utterly overlooked by him.

Perhaps some good angel arranged the way for him so that he was able to
slip past the guards without being challenged. Two of the guards were
talking at the corner of the barracks with their backs to him at the
particular second when he came in sight. A minute later they turned back
to their monotonous march and the shadow of the vanishing corporal had
just disappeared from among the other dark shadows of the night
landscape. Inside the barracks another guard welcomed him eagerly without
questioning his presence there at that hour:

"Say, Cam, how about day after to-morrow? Are you free? Will you take my
place on guard? I want to go up to Philadelphia and see my girl, and I'm
sure of a pass, but I'm listed for guard duty. I'll do the same for you
sometime."

"Sure!" said Cameron heartily, and swung up stairs with a sudden
realization that he had been granted a streak of good luck. Yet somehow
he did not seem to care much.

He tiptoed over to his bunk among the rows of sleeping forms, removed
from it a pair of shoes, three books, some newspapers and a mess kit
which some lazy comrades had left there, and threw himself down with
scant undressing. It seemed as though a great calamity had befallen him,
although when he tried to reason it out he could not understand how
things were so much changed from what they had been that morning before
he received the letter. Ruth Macdonald had never been anything in his
life but a lovely picture. There was no slightest possibility that she
would ever be more. She was like a distant star to be admired but never
come near. Had he been fool enough to have his head turned by her writing
that kind letter to him? Had he even remotely fancied she would ever be
anything nearer to him than just a formal friend who occasionally stooped
to give a bright smile or do a kindness? Well, if he had, he needed this
knockdown blow. It might be a good thing that it came so soon before he
had let this thing grow in his imagination; but oh, if it had but come a
bit sooner! If it had only been on the way over to the Y.M.C.A. hut
instead of on the way back that letter would never have been written! She
would have set him down as a boor perhaps, but what matter? What was she
to him, or he to her? Well--perhaps he would have written a letter
briefly to thank her for her offer of knitting, but it would have been an
entirely different letter from the one he did write. He ground his teeth
as he thought out the letter he should have written:

MY DEAR MISS MACDONALD: (No "friend" about that.)

It certainly was kind of you to think of me as a possible recipient of a
sweater. But I feel that there are other boys who perhaps need things
more than I do. I am well supplied with all necessities. I appreciate
your interest in an old school friend. The life of a soldier is not so
bad, and I imagine we shall have no end of novel experiences before the
war is over. I hope we shall be able to put an end to this terrible
struggle very soon when we get over and make the world a safe and happy
place for you and your friends. Here's hoping the men who are your
special friends will all come home safe and sound and soon.

Sincerely,

J. CAMERON.

He wrote that letter over and over mentally as he tossed on his bunk in
the dark, changing phrases and whole sentences. Perhaps it would be
better to say something about "her officer friends" and make it very
clear to her that he understood his own distant position with her. Then
suddenly he kicked the big blue blanket off and sat up with a deep sigh.
What a fool he was. He could not write another letter. The letter was
gone, and as it was written he must abide by it. He could not get it back
or unwrite it much as he wished it. There was no excuse, or way to make
it possible to write and refuse those sweaters and things, was there?

He sat staring into the darkness while the man in the next bunk roused to
toss back his blanket which had fallen superfluously across his face, and
to mutter some sleepy imprecations. But Cameron was off on the
composition of another letter:

MY DEAR MISS MACDONALD:

I have been thinking it over and have decided that I do not need a
sweater or any of those other things you mention. I really am pretty well
supplied with necessities, and you know they don't give us much room to
put anything around the barracks. There must be a lot of other fellows
who need them more, so I will decline that you may give your work to
others who have nothing, or to those who are your personal friends.

Very truly,

J. CAMERON.

Having convinced his turbulent brain that it was quite possible for him
to write such a letter as this, he flung himself miserably back on his
hard cot again and realized that he did not want to write it. That it
would be almost an insult to the girl, who even if she had been
patronizing him, had done it with a kind intent, and after all it was not
her fault that he was a fool. She had a right to marry whom she would.
Certainly he never expected her to marry him. Only he had to own to
himself that he wanted those things she had offered. He wanted to touch
something she had worked upon, and feel that it belonged to him. He
wanted to keep this much of human friendship for himself. Even if she was
going to marry another man, she had always been his ideal of a beautiful,
lovable woman, and as such she should stay his, even if she married a
dozen enemy officers!

It was then he began to see that the thing that was really making him
miserable was that she was giving her sweet young life to such a rotten
little mean-natured man as Wainwright. That was the real pain. If some
fine noble man like--well--like Captain La Rue, only younger, of course,
should come along he would be glad for her. But this excuse for a man!
Oh, it was outrageous! How could she be so deceived? and yet, of course,
women knew very little of men. They had no standards by which to judge
them. They had no opportunity to see them except in plain sight of those
they wished to please. One could not expect them to have discernment in
selecting their friends. But what a pity! Things were all wrong! There
ought to be some way to educate a woman so that she would realize the
dangers all about her and be somewhat protected. It was worse for Ruth
Macdonald because she had no men in her family who could protect her. Her
old grandfather was the only near living male relative and he was a
hopeless invalid, almost entirely confined to the house. What could he
know of the young men who came to court his granddaughter? What did he
remember of the ways of men, having been so many years shut away from
their haunts?

The corporal tossed on his hard cot and sighed like a furnace. There
ought to be some one to protect her. Someone ought to make her understand
what kind of a fellow Wainwright was! She had called him her knight, and
a knight's business was to protect, yet what could he do? He could not go
to her and tell her that the man she was going to marry was rotten and
utterly without moral principle. He could not even send some one else to
warn her. Who could he send? His mother? No, his mother would feel shy
and afraid of a girl like that. She had always lived a quiet life. He
doubted if she would understand herself how utterly unfit a mate
Wainwright was for a good pure girl. And there was no one else in the
world that he could send. Besides, if she loved the man, and
incomprehensible as it seemed, she must love him or why should she marry
him?--if she loved him she would not believe an angel from heaven against
him. Women were that way; that is, if they were good women, like Ruth.
Oh, to think of her tied up to that--_beast!_ He could think of no other
word. In his agony he rolled on his face and groaned aloud.

"Oh God!" his soul cried out, "why do such things have to be? If there
really is a God why does He let such awful things happen to a pure good
girl? The same old bitter question that had troubled the hard young days
of his own life. Could there be a God who cared when bitterness was in so
many cups? Why had God let the war come?"

Sometime in the night the tumult in his brain and heart subsided and he
fell into a profound sleep. The next thing he knew the kindly roughness
of his comrades wakened him with shakes and wet sponges flying through
the air, and he opened his consciousness to the world again and heard the
bugle blowing for roll call. Another day had dawned grayly and he must
get up. They set him on his feet, and bantered him into action, and he
responded with his usual wit that put them all in howls of laughter, but
as he stumbled into place in the line in the five o'clock dawning he
realized that a heavy weight was on his heart which he tried to throw
off. What did it matter what Ruth Macdonald did with her life? She was
nothing to him, never had been and never could be. If only he had not
written that letter all would now be as it always had been. If only she
had not written her letter! Or no! He put his hand to his breast pocket
with a quick movement of protection. Somehow he was not yet ready to
relinquish that one taste of bright girl friendliness, even though it had
brought a stab in its wake.

He was glad when the orders came for him and five other fellows to tramp
across the camp to the gas school and go through two solid hours of
instruction ending with a practical illustration of the gas mask and a
good dose of gas. It helped to put his mind on the great business of war
which was to be his only business now until it or he were ended. He set
his lips grimly and went about his work vigorously. What did it matter,
anyway, what she thought of him? He need never answer another letter,
even if she wrote. He need not accept the package from the post office.
He could let them send it back--refuse it and let them send it back, that
was what he could do! Then she might think what she liked. Perhaps she
would suppose him already gone to France. Anyhow, he would forget her! It
was the only sensible thing to do.

Meanwhile the letter had flown on its way with more than ordinary
swiftness, as if it had known that a force was seeking to bring it back
again. The Y.M.C.A. man was carried at high speed in an automobile to the
nearest station to the camp, and arrived in time to catch the Baltimore
train just stopping. In the Baltimore station he went to mail the letter
just as the letter gatherer arrived with his keys to open the box. So the
letter lost no time but was sorted and started northward before midnight,
and by some happy chance arrived at its destination in time to be laid by
Ruth Macdonald's plate at lunch time the next day.

Some quick sense must have warned Ruth, for she gathered her mail up and
slipped it unobtrusively into the pocket of her skirt before it could be
noticed. Dottie Wetherill had come home with her for lunch and the bright
red Y.M.C.A. triangle on the envelope was so conspicuous. Dottie was
crazy over soldiers and all things military. She would be sure to exclaim
and ask questions. She was one of those people who always found out
everything about you that you did not keep under absolute lock and key.

Every day since she had written her letter to Cameron Ruth had watched
for an answer, her cheeks glowing sometimes with the least bit of
mortification that she should have written at all to have received this
rebuff. Had he, after all, misunderstood her? Or had the letter gone
astray, or the man gone to the front? She had almost given up expecting
an answer now after so many weeks, and the nice warm olive-drab sweater
and neatly knitted socks with extra long legs and bright lines of color
at the top, with the wristlets and muffler lay wrapped in tissue paper at
the very bottom of a drawer in the chiffonier where she would seldom see
it and where no one else would ever find it and question her. Probably by
and by when the colored draftees were sent away she would get them out
and carry them down to the headquarters to be given to some needy man.
She felt humiliated and was beginning to tell herself that it was all her
own fault and a good lesson for her. She had even decided not to go and
see John Cameron's mother again lest that, too, might be misunderstood.
It seemed that the frank true instincts of her own heart had been wrong,
and she was getting what she justly deserved for departing from Aunt
Rhoda's strictly conventional code.

Nevertheless, the letter in her pocket which she had not been able to
look at carefully enough to be sure if she knew the writing, crackled and
rustled and set her heart beating excitedly, and her mind to wondering
what it might be. She answered Dottie Wetherill's chatter with distraught
monosyllables and absent smiles, hoping that Dottie would feel it
necessary to go home soon after lunch.

But it presently became plain that Dottie had no intention of going home
soon; that she had come for a purpose and that she was plying all her
arts to accomplish it. Ruth presently roused from her reverie to realize
this and set herself to give Dottie as little satisfaction as possible
out of her task. It was evident that she had been sent to discover the
exact standing and relation in which Ruth held Lieutenant Harry
Wainwright. Ruth strongly suspected that Dottie's brother Bob had been
the instigator of the mission, and she had no intention of giving him the
information.

So Ruth's smiles came out and the inscrutable twinkle grew in her lovely
eyes. Dottie chattered on sentence after sentence, paragraph after
paragraph, theme after theme, always rounding up at the end with some
perfectly obvious leading question. Ruth answered in all apparent
innocence and sincerity, yet with an utterly different turn of the
conversation from what had been expected, and with an indifference that
was hopelessly baffling unless the young ambassador asked a point blank
question, which she hardly dared to do of Ruth Macdonald without more
encouragement. And so at last a long two hours dragged thus away, and
finally Dottie Wetherill at the end of her small string, and at a loss
for more themes on which to trot around again to the main idea,
reluctantly accepted her defeat and took herself away, leaving Ruth to
her long delayed letter.

VIII

Ruth sat looking into space with starry eyes and glowing cheeks after she
had read the letter. It seemed to her a wonderful letter, quite the most
wonderful she had ever received. Perhaps it was because it fitted so
perfectly with her ideal of the writer, who from her little girlhood had
always been a picture of what a hero must be. She used to dream big
things about him when she was a child. He had been the best baseball
player in school when he was ten, and the handsomest little rowdy in
town, as well as the boldest, bravest champion of the little girls.

As she grew older and met him occasionally she had always been glad that
he kept his old hero look though often appearing in rough garb. She had
known they were poor. There had been some story about a loss of money and
a long expensive sickness of the father's following an accident which
made all the circumstances most trying, but she had never heard the
details. She only knew that most of the girls in her set looked on him as
a nobody and would no more have companied with him than with their
father's chauffeur. After he grew older and began to go to college some
of the girls began to think he was good looking, and to say it was quite
commendable in him to try to get an education. Some even unearthed the
fact that his had been a fine old family in former days and that there
had been wealth and servants once. But the story died down as John
Cameron walked his quiet way apart, keeping to his old friends, and not
responding to the feeble advances of the girls. Ruth had been away at
school in these days and had seldom seen him. When she had there had
always been that lingering admiration for him from the old days. She had
told herself that of course he could not be worth much or people would
know him. He was probably ignorant and uncultured, and a closer
acquaintance would show him far from what her young ideas had pictured
her hero. But somehow that day at the station, the look in his face had
revealed fine feeling, and she was glad now to have her intuition
concerning him verified by his letter.

And what a letter it was! Why, no young man of her acquaintance could
have written with such poetic delicacy. That paragraph about the rose was
beautiful, and not a bit too presuming, either, in one who had been a
perfect stranger all these years. She liked his simple frankness and the
easy way he went back twelve years and began just where they left off.
There was none of the bold forwardness that might have been expected in
one who had not moved in cultured society. There was no unpleasant
assumption of familiarity which might have emphasized her fear that she
had overstepped the bounds of convention in writing to him in the first
place. On the contrary, her humiliation at his long delayed answer was
all forgotten now. He had understood her perfectly and accepted her
letter in exactly the way she had meant it without the least bit of
foolishness or unpleasantness. In short, he had written the sort of a
letter that the kind of man she had always thought--hoped--he was would
be likely to write, and it gave her a surprisingly pleasant feeling of
satisfaction. It was as if she had discovered a friend all of her own not
made for her by her family, nor one to whom she fell heir because of her
wealth and position; but just one she had found, out in the great world
of souls.

If he had been going to remain at home there might have been a number of
questions, social and conventional, which would have arisen to bar the
way to this free feeling of a friendship, and which she would have had to
meet and reason with before her mind would have shaken itself unhampered;
but because he was going away and on such an errand, perhaps never to
return, the matter of what her friends might think or what the world
would say, simply did not enter into the question at all. The war had
lifted them both above such ephemeral barriers into the place of vision
where a soul was a soul no matter what he possessed or who he was. So, as
she sat in her big white room with all its dainty accessories to a
luxurious life, fit setting for a girl so lovely, she smiled unhindered
at this bit of beautiful friendship that had suddenly drifted down at her
feet out of a great outside unknown world. She touched the letter
thoughtfully with caressing fingers, and the kind of a high look in her
eyes that a lady of old must have worn when she thought of her knight. It
came to her to wonder that she had not felt so about any other of her men
friends who had gone into the service. Why should this special one
soldier boy represent the whole war, as it were, in this way to her.
However, it was but a passing thought, and with a smile still upon her
lips she went to the drawer and brought out the finely knitted garments
she had made, wrapping them up with care and sending them at once upon
their way. It somehow gave her pleasure to set aside a small engagement
she had for that afternoon until she had posted the package herself.

Even then, when she took her belated way to a little gathering in honor
of one of her girl friends who was going to be married the next week to a
young aviator, she kept the smile on her lips and the dreamy look in her
eyes, and now and then brought herself back from the chatter around her
to remember that something pleasant had happened. Not that there was any
foolishness in her thoughts. There was too much dignity and simplicity
about the girl, young as she was, to allow her to deal even with her own
thoughts in any but a maidenly way, and it was not in the ordinary way of
a maid with a man that she thought of this young soldier. He was so far
removed from her life in every way, and all the well-drilled formalities,
that it never occurred to her to think of him in the same way she thought
of her other men friends.

A friend who understood her, and whom she could understand. That was what
she had always wanted and what she had never quite had with any of her
young associates. One or two had approached to that, but always there had
been a point at which they had fallen short. That she should make this
man her friend whose letter crackled in her pocket, in that intimate
sense of the word, did not occur to her even now. He was somehow set
apart for service in her mind; and as such she had chosen him to be her
special knight, she to be the lady to whom he might look for
encouragement--whose honor he was going forth to defend. It was a misty
dreamy ideal of a thought. Somehow she would not have picked out any
other of her boy friends to be a knight for her. They were too flippant,
too careless and light hearted. The very way in which they lighted their
multitudinous cigarettes and flipped the match away gave impression that
they were going to have the time of their lives in this war. They might
have patriotism down at the bottom of all this froth and boasting,
doubtless they had; but there was so little seriousness about them that
one would never think of them as knights, defenders of some great cause
of righteousness. Perhaps she was all wrong. Perhaps it was only her old
baby fancy for the little boy who could always "lick" the other boys and
save the girls from trouble that prejudiced her in his favor, but at
least it was pleasant and a great relief to know that her impulsive
letter had not been misunderstood.

The girls prattled of this one and that who were "going over" soon, told
of engagements and marriages soon to occur; criticized the brides and
grooms to be; declared their undying opinions about what was fitting for
a war bride to wear; and whether they would like to marry a man who had
to go right into war and might return minus an arm or an eye. They
discoursed about the U-boats with a frothy cheerfulness that made Ruth
shudder; and in the same breath told what nice eyes a young captain had
who had recently visited the town, and what perfectly lovely uniforms he
wore. They argued with serious zeal whether a girl should wear an
olive-drab suit this year if she wanted to look really smart.

They were the girls among whom she had been brought up, and Ruth was used
to their froth, but somehow to-day it bored her beyond expression. She
was glad to make an excuse to get away and she drove her little car
around by the way of John Cameron's home hoping perhaps to get a glimpse
of his mother again. But the house had a shut up look behind the vine
that he had trained, as if it were lonely and lying back in a long wait
till he should come--or not come! A pang went through her heart. For the
first time she thought what it meant for a young life like that to be
silenced by cold steel. The home empty! The mother alone! His ambitions
and hopes unfulfilled! It came to her, too, that if he were her knight he
might have to die for her--for his cause! She shuddered and swept the
unpleasant thought away, but it had left its mark and would return again.

On the way back she passed a number of young soldiers home on twenty-four
hour leave from the nearby camps. They saluted most eagerly, and she knew
that any one of them would have gladly occupied the vacant seat in her
car, but she was not in the mood to talk with them. She felt that there
was something to be thought out and fixed in her mind, some impression
that life had for her that afternoon that she did not want to lose in the
mild fritter of gay banter that would be sure to follow if she stopped
and took home some of the boys. So she bowed graciously and swept by at a
high speed as if in a great hurry. The war! The war! It was beating
itself into her brain again in much the same way it had done on that
morning when the drafted men went away, only now it had taken on a more
personal touch. She kept seeing the lonely vine-clad house where that one
soldier had lived, and which he had left so desolate. She kept thinking
how many such homes and mothers there must be in the land.

That evening when she was free to go to her room she read John Cameron's
letter again, and then, feeling almost as if she were childish in her
haste, she sat down and wrote an answer. Somehow that second reading made
her feel his wish for an answer. It seemed a mute appeal that she could
not resist.

When John Cameron received that letter and the accompanying package he
was lifted into the seventh heaven for a little while. He forgot all his
misgivings, he even forgot Lieutenant Wainwright who had but that day
become a most formidable foe, having been transferred to Cameron's
company, where he was liable to be commanding officer in absence of the
captain, and where frequent salutes would be inevitable. It had been a
terrible blow to Cameron. But now it suddenly seemed a small matter. He
put on his new sweater and swelled around the way the other boys did,
letting them all admire him. He examined the wonderful socks almost
reverently, putting a large curious finger gently on the red and blue
stripes and thrilling with the thought that her fingers had plied the
needles in those many, many stitches to make them. He almost felt it
would be sacrilege to wear them, and he laid them away most carefully and
locked them into the box under his bed lest some other fellow should
admire and desire them to his loss. But with the letter he walked away
into the woods as far as the bounds of the camp would allow and read and
reread it, rising at last from it as one refreshed from a comforting meal
after long fasting. It was on the way back to his barracks that night,
walking slowly under the starlight, not desiring to be back until the
last minute before night taps because he did not wish to break the
wonderful evening he had spent with her, that he resolved to try to get
leave the next Saturday and go home to thank her.

Back in the barracks with the others he fairly scintillated with wit and
kept his comrades in roars of laughter until the officer of the night
suppressed them summarily. But long after the others were asleep he lay
thinking of her, and listening to the singing of his soul as he watched a
star that twinkled with a friendly gleam through a crack in the roof
above his cot. Once again there came the thought of God, and a feeling of
gratitude for this lovely friendship in his life. If he knew where God
was he would like to thank Him. Lying so and looking up to the star he
breathed from his heart a wordless thanksgiving.

The next night he wrote and told her he was coming, and asked permission
to call and thank her face to face. Then he fairly haunted the post
office at mail time the rest of the week hoping for an answer. He had not
written his mother about his coming, for he meant not to go this week if
there came no word from Ruth. Besides, it would be nice to surprise his
mother. Then there was some doubt about his getting a pass anyway, and so
between the two anxieties he was kept busy up to the last minute. But
Friday evening he got his pass, and in the last mail came a special
delivery from Ruth, just a brief note saying she had been away from home
when his letter arrived, but she would be delighted to see him on Sunday
afternoon as he had suggested.

He felt like a boy let loose from school as he brushed up his uniform and
polished his big army shoes while his less fortunate companions kidded
him about the girl he was going to see. He denied their thrusts joyously,
in his heart repudiating any such personalities, yet somehow it was
pleasant. He had never realized how pleasant it would be to have a girl
and be going to see her--such a girl! Of course, she was not for him--not
with that possessiveness. But she was a friend, a real friend, and he
would not let anything spoil the pleasure of that!

He had not thought anything in his army experience could be so exciting
as that first ride back home again. Somehow the deference paid to his
uniform got into his blood and made him feel that people all along the
line really did care for what the boys were doing for them. It made camp
life and hardships seem less dreary.

It was great to get back to his little mother and put his big arms around
her again. She seemed so small. Had she shrunken since he left her or was
he grown so much huskier with the out of door life? Both, perhaps, and he
looked at her sorrowfully. She was so little and quiet and brave to bear
life all alone. If he only could get back and get to succeeding in life
so that he might make some brightness for her. She had borne so much, and
she ought not to have looked so old and worn at her age! For a brief
instant again his heart was almost bitter, and he wondered what God meant
by giving his good little mother so much trouble. Was there a God when
such things could be? He resolved to do something about finding out this
very day.

It was pleasant to help his mother about the kitchen, saving her as she
had not been saved since he left, telling her about the camp, and
listening to her tearful admiration of him. She could scarcely take her
eyes from him, he seemed so tall and big and handsome in his uniform; he
appeared so much older and more manly that her heart yearned for her boy
who seemed to be slipping away from her. It was so heavenly blessed to
sit down beside him and sew on a button and mend a torn spot in his
flannel shirt and have him pat her shoulder now and then contentedly.

Then with pride she sent him down to the store for something nice for
dinner, and watched him through the window with a smile, the tears
running down her cheeks. How tall and straight he walked! How like his
father when she first knew him! She hoped the neighbors all were looking
out and would see him. Her boy! Her soldier boy! And he must go away from
her, perhaps to die!

But--_he was here to-day_! She would not think of the rest. She would
rejoice now in his presence.

He walked briskly down the street past the houses that had been familiar
all his life, meeting people who had never been wont to notice him
before; and they smiled upon him from afar now; greeted him with
enthusiasm, and turned to look after him as he passed on. It gave him a
curious feeling to have so much attention from people who had never known
him before. It made him feel strangely small, yet filled with a great
pride and patriotism for the country that was his, and the government
which he now represented to them all. He was something more to them now
than just one of the boys about town who had grown up among them. He was
a soldier of the United States. He had given his life for the cause of
righteousness. The bitterness he might have felt at their former ignoring
of him, was all swallowed up in their genuine and hearty friendliness.

He met the white-haired minister, kindly and dignified, who paused to ask
him how he liked camp life and to commend him as a soldier; and looking
in his strong gentle face John Cameron remembered his resolve.

He flashed a keen look at the gracious countenance and made up his mind
to speak:

"I'd like to ask you a question, Doctor Thurlow. It's been bothering me
quite a little ever since this matter of going away to fight has been in
my mind. Is there any way that a man--that _I_ can find God? That is, if
there is a God. I've never thought much about it before, but life down
there in camp makes a lot of things seem different, and I've been
wondering. I'm not sure what I believe. Is there anyway I can find out?"

A pleasant gleam of surprise and delight thrilled into the deep blue eyes
of the minister. It was startling. It almost embarrassed him for a
moment, it was so unexpected to have a soldier ask a question about God.
It was almost mortifying that he had never thought it worth while to take
the initiative on that question with the young man.

"Why, certainly!" he said heartily. "Of course, of course. I'm very glad
to know you are interested in those things. Couldn't you come in to my
study and talk with me. I think I could help you. I'm sure I could."

"I haven't much time," said Cameron shyly, half ashamed now that he had
opened his heart to an almost stranger. He was not even his mother's
minister, and he was a comparative newcomer in the town. How had he come
to speak to him so impulsively?

"I understand, exactly, of course," said the minister with growing
eagerness. "Could you come in now for five or ten minutes? I'll turn back
with you and you can stop on your way, or we can talk as we go. Were you
thinking of uniting with the church? We have our communion the first
Sunday of next month. I should be very glad if you could arrange. We have
a number of young people coming in now. I'd like to see you come with
them. The church is a good safe place to be. It was established by God.
It is a school in which to learn of Him. It is----"

"But I'm not what you would call a Christian!" protested Cameron. "I
don't even know that I believe in the Bible. I don't know what your
church believes. I don't have a very definite idea what any church
believes. I would be a hypocrite to stand up and join a church when I
wasn't sure there was a God."

"My dear young fellow!" said the minister affectionately. "Not at all!
Not at all! The church is the place for young people to come when they
have doubts. It is a shelter, and a growing place. Just trust yourself to
God and come in among His people and your doubts will vanish. Don't worry
about doubts. Many people have doubts. Just let them alone and put
yourself in the right way and you will forget them. I should be glad to
talk with you further. I would like to see you come into communion with
God's people. If you want to find God you should come where He has
promised to be. It is a great thing to have a fine young fellow like you,
and a soldier, array himself on the side of God. I would like to see you
stand up on the right side before you go out to meet danger and perhaps
death."

John Cameron stood watching him as he talked.

"He's a good old guy," he thought gravely, "but he doesn't get my point.
He evidently believes what he says, but I don't just see going
blindfolded into a church. However, there's something to what he says
about going where God is if I want to find him."

Out loud he merely said:

"I'll think about it, Doctor, and perhaps come in to see you the next
time I'm home." Then he excused himself and went on to the store.

As he walked away he said to himself:

"I wonder what Ruth Macdonald would say if I asked her the same question?
I wonder if she has thought anything about it? I wonder if I'd ever have
the nerve to ask her?"

The next morning he suggested to his mother that they go to Doctor
Thurlow's church together. She would have very much preferred going to
her own church with him, but she knew that he did not care for the
minister and had never been very friendly with the people, so she put
aside her secret wish and went with him. To tell the truth she was very
proud to go anywhere with her handsome soldier son, and one thing that
made her the more willing was that she remembered that the Macdonalds
always went to the Presbyterian church, and perhaps they would be there
to-day and Ruth would see them. But she said not a word of this to her
boy.

John spent most of the time with his mother. He went up to college for an
hour or so Saturday evening, dropping in on his fraternity for a few
minutes and realizing what true friends he had among the fellows who were
left, though most of them were gone. He walked about the familiar rooms,
looking at the new pictures, photographs of his friends in uniform. This
one was a lieutenant in Officers' Training Camp. That one had gone with
the Ambulance Corps. Tom was with the Engineers, and Jimmie and Sam had
joined the Tank Service. Two of the fellows were in France in the front
ranks, another had enlisted in the Marines, it seemed that hardly any
were left, and of those three had been turned down for some slight
physical defect, and were working in munition factories and the
ship-yard. Everything was changed. The old playmates had become men with
earnest purposes. He did not stay long. There was a restlessness about it
all that pulled the strings of his heart, and made him realize how
different everything was.

Sunday morning as he walked to church with his mother he wondered why he
had never gone more with her when he was at home. It seemed a pleasant
thing to do.

The service was beautifully solemn, and Doctor Thurlow had many gracious
words to say of the boys in the army, and spent much time reading letters
from those at the front who belonged to the church and Sunday school, and
spoke of the "supreme sacrifice" in the light of a saving grace; but the
sermon was a gentle ponderous thing that got nowhere, spiced toward its
close with thrilling scenes from battle news. John Cameron as he listened
did not feel that he had found God. He did not feel a bit enlightened by
it. He laid it to his own ignorance and stupidity, though, and determined
not to give up the search. The prayer at the close of the sermon somehow
clinched this resolve because there was something so genuine and sweet
and earnest about it. He could not help thinking that the man might know
more of God than he was able to make plain to his hearers. He had really
never noticed either a prayer or a sermon before in his life. He had sat
in the room with very few. He wondered if all sermons and prayers were
like these and wished he had noticed them. He had never been much of a
church goer.

But the climax, the real heart of his whole two days, was after Sunday
dinner when he went out to call upon Ruth Macdonald. And it was
characteristic of his whole reticent nature, and the way he had been
brought up, that he did not tell his mother where he was going. It had
never occurred to him to tell her his movements when they did not
directly concern her, and she had never brought herself up to ask him. It
is the habit of some women, and many mothers.

A great embarrassment fell upon him as he entered the grounds of the
Macdonald place, and when he stood before the plate-glass doors waiting
for an answer to his ring he would have turned and fled if he had not
promised to come.

It was perhaps not an accident that Ruth let him in herself and took him
to a big quiet library with wide-open windows overlooking the lawn, and
heavy curtains shutting them in from the rest of the house, where, to his
great amazement, he could feel at once at ease with her and talk to her
just as he had done in her letters and his own.

Somehow it was like having a lifetime dream suddenly fulfilled to be
sitting this way in pleasant converse with her, watching the lights and
shadows of expression flit across her sensitive face, and knowing that
the light in her eyes was for him. It seemed incredible, but she
evidently enjoyed talking to him. Afterwards he thought about it as if
their souls had been calling to one another across infinite space, things
that neither of them could quite hear, and now they were within hailing
distance.

He had thanked her for the sweater and other things, and they had talked
a little about the old school days and how life changed people, when he
happened to glance out of the window near him and saw a man in officer's
uniform approaching. He stopped short in the midst of a sentence and
rose, his face set, his eyes still on the rapidly approaching soldiers:

"I'm sorry," he said, "I shall have to go. It's been wonderful to come,
but I must go at once. Perhaps you'll let me go out this way. It is a
shorter cut. Thank you for everything, and perhaps if there's ever
another time--I'd like to come again----"

"Oh, please don't go yet!" she said putting out her hand in protest. But
he grasped the hand with a quick impulsive grip and with a hasty: "I'm
sorry, but I must!" he opened the glass door to the side piazza and was
gone.

In much bewilderment and distress Ruth watched him stride away toward the
hedge and disappear. Then she turned to the front window and caught a
glimpse of Lieutenant Wainwright just mounting the front steps. What did
it all mean?

Ruth tried to control her perturbation and meet her guest with an
unruffled countenance, but there was something about the bland smug
countenance of Lieutenant Wainwright that irritated her. To have her
first pleasant visit with Cameron suddenly broken up in this mysterious
fashion, and Wainwright substituted for Cameron was somehow like taking a
bite of some pleasant fruit and having it turn out plain potato in one's
mouth. It was so sudden, like that. She could not seem to get her
equilibrium. Her mind was in a whirl of question and she could not focus
it on her present caller nor think of anything suitable to say to him.
She was not even sure but that he was noticing that she was distraught.

To have John Cameron leave in that precipitate manner at the sight of
Harry Wainwright! It was all too evident that he had seen him through the
window. But they were fellow townsmen, and had gone to school together!
Surely he knew him! Of course, Harry was a superior officer, but Cameron
would not be the kind of man to mind that. She could not understand it.
There had been a look in his face--a set look! There must be something
behind it all. Some reason why he did not want to be seen by Wainwright.
Surely Cameron had nothing of which to be ashamed! The thought brought a
sudden dismay. What did she know about Cameron after all? A look, a
smile, a bit of boyish gallantry. He might be anything but fine in his
private life, of course, and Harry might be cognizant of the fact. Yet he
did not look like that. Even while the thought forced itself into her
mind she resented it and resisted it. Then turning to her guest who was
giving an elaborate account of how he had saved a woman's life in an
automobile accident, she interrupted him:

"Harry, what do you know about John Cameron?" she asked impulsively.

Wainwright's face darkened with an ugly frown.

"More than I want to know," he answered gruffly. "He's rotten! That's
all! Why?" He eyed her suspiciously.

There was something in his tone that put her on the defensive at once:

"Oh, I saw him to-day, and I was wondering," she answered evasively.

"It's one of the annoyances of army life that we have to be herded up
with all sorts of cattle!" said Wainwright with a disdainful curl of his
baby mustache. "But I didn't come here to talk about John Cameron. I came
to tell you that I'm going to be married, Ruth. I'm going to be married
before I go to France!"

"Delightful!" said Ruth pleasantly. "Do I know the lady?"

"Indeed you do," he said watching her with satisfaction. "You've known,
for several years that you were the only one for me, and I've come to
tell you that I won't stand any more dallying. I mean business now!"

He crossed his fat leather puttees creakily and swelled out, trying to
look firm. He had decided that he must impress her with the seriousness
of the occasion.

But Ruth only laughed merrily. He had been proposing to her ever since he
got out of short trousers, and she had always laughed him out of it. The
first time she told him that she was only a kid and he wasn't much more
himself, and she didn't want to hear any more such talk. Of late he had
grown less troublesome, and she had been inclined to settle down to the
old neighborly playmate relation, so she was not greatly disturbed by the
turn of the conversation. In fact, she was too much upset and annoyed by
the sudden departure of Cameron to realize the determined note in
Wainwright's voice.

"I mean it!" he said in an offended tone, flattening his double chin and
rolling out his fat lips importantly. "I'm not to be played with any
longer."

Ruth's face sobered:

"I certainly never had an idea of playing with you, Harry. I think I've
always been quite frank with you."

Wainwright felt that he wasn't getting on quite as well as he had
planned. He frowned and sat up:

"Now see here, Ruth! Let's talk this thing over!" he said, drawing the
big leather chair in which he was sitting nearer to hers.

But Ruth's glance had wandered out of the window. "Why, there comes
Bobbie Wetherill!" she exclaimed eagerly and slipped out of her chair to
the door just as one of Wainwright's smooth fat hands reached out to take
hold of the arm of her rocker. "I'll open the door for him. Mary is in
the kitchen and may not hear the bell right away."

There was nothing for Wainwright to do but make the best of the
situation, although he greeted Wetherill with no very good grace, and his
large lips pouted out sulkily as he relaxed into his chair again to await
the departure of the intruder.

Lieutenant Wetherill was quite overwhelmed with the warmth of the
greeting he received from Ruth and settled down to enjoy it while it
lasted. With a wicked glance of triumph at his rival he laid himself out
to make his account of camp life as entertaining as possible. He produced
a gorgeous box of bonbons and arranged himself comfortably for the
afternoon, while Wainwright's brow grew darker and his lips pouted out
farther and farther under his petted little moustache. It was all a great
bore to Ruth just now with her mind full of the annoyance about Cameron.
At least she would have preferred to have had her talk with him and found
out what he was with her own judgment. But anything was better than, a
_tête-à-tête_ with Wainwright just now; so she ate bonbons and asked
questions, and kept the conversation going, ignoring Wainwright's
increasing grouch.

It was a great relief, however, when about half-past four the maid
appeared at the door:

"A long distance telephone call for you, Miss Ruth."

As Ruth was going up the stairs to her own private 'phone she paused to
fasten the tie of her low shoe that had come undone and was threatening
to trip her, and she heard Harry Wainwright's voice in an angry snarl:

"What business did you have coming here to-day, you darned chump! You
knew what I came for, and you did it on purpose! If you don't get out the
minute she gets back I'll put her wise to you and the kind of girls you
go with in no time. And you needn't think you can turn the tables on me,
either, for I'll fix you so you won't dare open your fool mouth!"

The sentence finished with an oath and Ruth hurried into her room and
shut the door with a sick kind of feeling that her whole little world was
turning black about her.

It was good to hear the voice of her cousin, Captain La Rue, over the
'phone, even though it was but a message that he could not come as he had
promised that evening. It reassured her that there were good men in the
world. Of course, he was older, but she was sure he had never been what
people called "wild," although he had plenty of courage and spirit. She
had often heard that good men were few, but it had never seemed to apply
to her world but vaguely. Now here of a sudden a slur had been thrown at
three of her young world. John Cameron, it is true, was a comparative
stranger, and, of course, she had no means of judging except by the look
in his eyes. She understood in a general way that "rotten" as applied to
a young man's character implied uncleanness. John Cameron's eyes were
steady and clear. They did not look that way. But then, how could she
tell? And here, this very minute she had been hearing that Bobbie
Wetherill's life was not all that it should be and Wainwright had tacitly
accepted the possibility of the same weakness in himself. These were boys
with whom she had been brought up. Selfish and conceited she had often
thought them on occasion, but it had not occurred to her that there might
be anything worse. She pressed her hands to her eyes and tried to force a
calm steadiness into her soul. Somehow she had an utter distaste for
going back into that library and hearing their boastful chatter. Yet she
must go. She had been hoping all the afternoon for her cousin's arrival
to send the other two away. Now that was out of the question and she must
use her own tact to get pleasantly rid of them. With a sigh she opened
her door and started down stairs again.

It was Wainwright's blatant voice again that broke through the Sabbath
afternoon stillness of the house as she approached the library door:

"Yes, I've got John Cameron all right now!" he laughed. "He won't hold
his head so high after he's spent a few days in the guard-house. And
that's what they're all going to get that are late coming back this time.
I found out before I left camp that his pass only reads till eleven
o'clock and the five o'clock train is the last one he can leave Chester
on to get him to camp by eleven. So I hired a fellow that was coming up
to buddy-up to Cam and fix it that he is to get a friend of his to take
them over to Chester in time for the train. The fellow don't have to get
back himself to-night at all, but he isn't going to let on, you know, so
Cam will think they're in the same boat. Then they're going to have a
little bit of tire trouble, down in that lonely bit of rough road, that
short cut between here and Chester, where there aren't any cars passing
to help them out, and they'll miss the train at Chester. See? And then
the man will offer to take them on to camp in his car and they'll get
stuck again down beyond Wilmington, lose the road, and switch off toward
Singleton--you know, where we took those girls to that little
out-of-the-way tavern that time--and you see Cam getting back to camp in
time, don't you?"

Ruth had paused with her hand on the heavy portiere, wide-eyed.

"But Cameron'll find a way out. He's too sharp. He'll start to walk, or
he'll get some passing car to take him," said Wetherill with conviction.

"No, he won't. The fellows are all primed. They're going to catch him in
spots where cars don't go, where the road is bad, you know, and nobody
but a fool would go with a car. He won't be noticing before they break
down because this fellow told him his man could drive a car over the moon
and never break down. Besides, I know my men. They'll get away with the
job. There's too much money in it for them to run any risk of losing out.
It's all going to happen so quick he won't be ready for anything."

"Well, you'll have your trouble for your pains. Cam'll explain everything
to the officers and he'll get by. He always does."

"Not this time. They've just made a rule that no excuses go. There've
been a lot of fellows coming back late drunk. And you see that's how we
mean to wind up. They are going to get him drunk, and then we'll see if
little Johnnie will go around with his nose in the air any longer! I'm
going to run down to the tavern late this evening to see the fun my
self!"

"You can't do it! Cam won't drink! It's been tried again and again. He'd
rather die!"

But the girl at the door had fled to her room on velvet shod feet and
closed her door, her face white with horror, her lips set with purpose,
her heart beating wildly. She must put a stop somehow to this diabolical
plot against him. Whether he was worthy or not they should not do this
thing to him! She rang for the maid and began putting on her hat and coat
and flinging a few things into a small bag. She glanced at her watch. It
was a quarter to five. Could she make it? If she only knew which way he
had gone! Would his mother have a telephone? Her eyes scanned the C
column hurriedly. Yes, there it was. She might have known he would not
allow her to be alone without a telephone.

The maid appeared at the door.

"Mary," she said, trying to speak calmly, "tell Thomas to have the gray
car ready at once. He needn't bring it to the house, I will come out the
back way. Please take this bag and two long coats out, and when I am gone
go to the library and ask the two gentlemen there to excuse me. Say that
I am suddenly called away to a friend in trouble. If Aunt Rhoda returns
soon tell her I will call her up later and let her know my plans. That is
all. I will be down in two or three minutes and I wish to start without
delay!"

Mary departed on her errand and Ruth went to the telephone and called up
the Cameron number.

The sadness of the answering voice struck her even in her haste. Her own
tone was eager, intimate, as she hastened to convey her message.

"Mrs. Cameron, this is Ruth Macdonald. Has your son left yet? I was
wondering if he would care to be taken to the train in our car?"

"Oh! he has _just gone_!" came a pitiful little gasp that had a sob at
the end of it. "He went in somebody's car and they were late coming. I'm
afraid he is going to miss his train and he has got to get it or he will
be in trouble! That is the last train that connects with Wilmington."

Ruth's heart leaped to her opportunity.

"Suppose we try to catch him then," proposed Ruth gleefully. "My car can
go pretty fast, and if he has missed the train perhaps we can carry him
on to Wilmington. Would you like to try?"

"Oh, could we?" the voice throbbed with eagerness.

"Hurry up then. My car is all ready. I'll be down there in three minutes.
We've no time to waste. Put on something warm!"

She hung up the receiver without waiting for further reply, and hurried
softly out of the room and down the back stairs.

Thomas was well trained. The cars were always in order. He was used to
Ruth's hurry calls, and when she reached the garage she found the car
standing in the back street waiting for her. In a moment more she was
rushing on her way toward the village without having aroused the
suspicion of the two men who so impatiently awaited her return. Mrs.
Cameron was ready, eager as a child, standing on the sidewalk with a
great blanket shawl over her arm and looking up the street for her.

It was not until they had swept through the village, over the bridge, and
were out on the broad highway toward Chester that Ruth began to realize
what a wild goose chase she had undertaken. Just where did she expect to
find them, anyway? It was now three minutes to five by the little clock
in the car and it was a full fifteen minutes' drive to Chester. The plan
had been to delay him on the way to the train, and there had been mention
of a short cut. Could that be the rough stony road that turned down
sharply just beyond the stone quarry? It seemed hardly possible that
anybody would attempt to run a car over that road. Surely John Cameron
knew the roads about here well enough to advise against it. Still, Ruth
knew the locality like a book and that was the only short cut thereabout.
If they had gone down there they might emerge at the other end just in
time to miss the train, and then start on toward Wilmington. Or they
might turn back and take the longer way if they found the short road
utterly impassable. Which should she take? Should she dare that rocky
way? If only there might be some tracks to guide her. But the road was
hard and dusty and told no tales of recent travelers. They skimmed down
the grade past the stone quarry, and the short cut flashed into view,
rough and hilly, turning sharply away behind a group of spruce trees. It
was thick woods beyond. If she went that way and got into any trouble
with her machine the chances were few that anyone would some along to
help. She had but a moment to decide, and something told her that the
long way was the safe one and shorter in the end. She swept on, her
engine throbbing with that pleasant purr of expensive well-groomed
machinery, the car leaping forward as if it delighted in the high speed.
The little woman by her side sat breathless and eager, with shining eyes,
looking ahead for her boy.

They passed car after car, and Ruth scanned the occupants keenly. Some
were filled with soldiers, but John Cameron was not among them. She began
to be afraid that perhaps she ought after all to have gone down that
hilly way and made sure they were not there. She was not quite sure where
that short road came out. If she knew she might run up a little way from
this further end.

The two women sat almost silent, straining their eyes ahead. They had
said hardly a word since the first greeting. Each seemed to understand
the thought of the other without words. For the present they had but one
common object, to find John Cameron.

Suddenly, as far ahead as they could see, a car darted out of the wooded
roadside, swung into their road and plunged ahead at a tremendous rate.
They had a glimpse of khaki uniforms, but it was much too far away to
distinguish faces or forms. Nevertheless, both women fastened their eyes
upon it with but one thought. Ruth put on more speed and forged ahead,
thankful that she was not within city lines yet, and that there was no
one about to remind her of the speed limit. Something told her that the
man she was seeking was in that car ahead.

It was a thrilling race. Ruth said no word, but she knew that her
companion was aware that she was chasing that car. Mrs. Cameron sat
straight and tense as if it had been a race of life and death, her cheeks
glowing and her eyes shining. Ruth was grateful that she did not talk.
Some women would have talked incessantly.

The other car did not go in to Chester proper at all, but veered away
into a branch road and Ruth followed, leaping over the road as if it had
been a gray velvet ribbon. She did not seem to be gaining on the car; but
it was encouraging that they could keep it still in sight. Then there
came a sharp turn of the road and it was gone. They were pulsing along
now at a tremendous rate. The girl had cast caution to the winds. She was
hearing the complacent sneer of Harry Wainwright as he boasted how they
would get John Cameron into trouble, and all the force of her strong
young will was enlisted to frustrate his plans.

It was growing dusk, and lights leaped out on the munition factories all
about them. Along the river other lights flashed and flickered in the
white mist that rose like a wreath. But Ruth saw nothing of it all. She
was straining her eyes for the little black speck of a car which she had
been following and which now seemed to be swallowed up by the evening.
She had not relaxed her speed, and the miles were whirling by, and she
had a growing consciousness that she might be passing the object of her
chase at any minute without knowing it. Presently they came to a junction
of three roads, and she paused. On ahead the road was broad and empty
save for a car coming towards them. Off to the right was a desolate way
leading to a little cemetery. Down to the left a smooth wooded road wound
into the darkness. There were sign boards up. Ruth leaned out and flashed
a pocket torch on the board. "TO PINE TREE INN, 7 Miles" it read. Did she
fancy it or was it really true that she could hear the distant sound of a
car among the pines?

"I'm going down this way!" she said decidedly to her companion, as if her
action needed an explanation, and she turned her car into the new road.

"But it's too late now," said Mrs. Cameron wistfully. "The train will be
gone, of course, even from Wilmington. And you ought to be going home.
I'm very wrong to have let you come so far; and it's getting dark. Your
folks will be worrying about you. That man will likely do his best to get
him to camp in time."

"No," said Ruth decidedly, "there's no one at home to worry just now, and
I often go about alone rather late. Besides, aren't we having a good
time? We're going a little further anyway before we give up."

She began to wonder in her heart if she ought not to have told somebody
else and taken Thomas along to help. It was rather a questionable thing
for her to do, in the dusk of the evening--to women all alone. But then,
she had Mrs. Cameron along and that made it perfectly respectable. But if
she failed now, what else could she do? Her blood boiled hotly at the
thought of letting Harry Wainwright succeed in his miserable plot. Oh,
for cousin La Rue! He would have thought a way out of this. If everything
else failed she would tell the whole story to Captain La Rue and beg him
to exonerate John Cameron. But that, of course, she knew would be hard to
do, there was so much red tape in the army, and there were so many
unwritten laws that could not be set aside just for private individuals.
Still, there must be a way if she had to go herself to someone and tell
what she had overheard. She set her pretty lips firmly and rode on at a
brisk pace down the dark road, switching on her head lights to seem the
way here in the woods. And then suddenly, just in time she jerked on the
brake and came to a jarring stop, for ahead of her a big car was sprawled
across the road, and there, rising hurriedly from a kneeling posture
before the engine, in the full blaze of her headlights, blinking and
frowning with anxiety, stood John Cameron!

The end of her chase came so unexpectedly that her wits were completely
scattered. Now that she was face to face with the tall soldier she had
nothing to say for her presence there. What would he think of her? How
could she explain her coming? She had undertaken the whole thing in such
haste that she had not planned ahead. Now she knew that from the start
she had understood that she must not explain how she came to be possessed
of any information concerning him. She felt a kind of responsible shame
for her old playmate Harry Wainright, and a certain loyalty toward her
own social set that prevented her from that, the only possible
explanation that could make her coming justifiable. So, now in the brief
interval before he had recognized them she must stage the next act, and
she found herself unable to speak, her throat dry, her lips for the
instant paralyzed. It was the jubilant little mother that stepped into
the crisis and did the most natural thing in the world:

"John! Oh John! It's really you! We've caught you!" she cried, and the
troubled young soldier peering into the dusk to discover if here was a
vehicle he might presume to commandeer to help him out of his predicament
lifted startled eyes to the two faces in the car and strode forward,
abandoning with a clang the wrench with which he had been working on the
car.

"Mother!" he said, a shade of deep anxiety in his voice. "What is the
matter? How came you to be here?"

"Why, I came after you," she said laughing like a girl. "We're going to
see that you get to camp in time. We've made pretty good time so far.
Jump in quick and we'll tell you the rest on the way. We mustn't waste
time."

Cameron's startled gaze turned on Ruth now, and a great wonder and
delight sprang up in his eyes. It was like the day when he went away on
the train, only more so, and it brought a rich flush into Ruth's cheeks.
As she felt the hot waves she was glad that she was sitting behind the
light.

"What! You?" he breathed wonderingly. "But this is too much! And after
the way I treated you!"

His mother looked wonderingly from one to the other:

"Get in, John, quick. We mustn't lose a minute. Something might delay us
later." It was plain she was deeply impressed with the necessity for the
soldier not to be found wanting.

"Yes, please get in quickly, and let us start. Then we can talk!" said
Ruth, casting an anxious glance toward the other car.

His hand went out to the door to open it, the wonder still shining in his
face, when a low murmur like a growl went up behind him.

Ruth looked up, and there in the full glare of the lights stood two burly
civilians and a big soldier:

"Oh, I say!" drawled the soldier in no very pleasant tone, "you're not
going to desert us that way! Not after Pass came out of his way for us! I
didn't think you had a yellow streak!"

Cameron paused and a troubled look came into his face. He glanced at the
empty back seat with a repression of his disappointment in the necessity.

"There's another fellow here that has to get back at the same time I do,"
he said looking at Ruth hesitatingly.

"Certainly. Ask him, of course." Ruth's voice was hearty and put the
whole car at his disposal.

"There's room for you, too, Chalmers," he said with relief. "And Passmore
will be glad to get rid of us I suspect. He'll be able to get home soon.
There isn't much the matter with that engine. If you do what I told you
to that carburetor you'll find it will go all right. Come on, Chalmers.
We ought to hurry!"

"No thanks! I stick to my friends!" said the soldier shortly.

"As you please!" said Cameron stepping on the running board.

"Not as _you_ please!" said a gruff voice, "I'm running this party and we
all go together? See?" A heavy hand came down upon Cameron's shoulder
with a mighty grip.

Cameron landed a smashing blow under the man's chin which sent him
reeling and sprang inside as Ruth threw in the clutch and sent her car
leaping forward. The two men in front were taken by surprise and barely
got out of the way in time, but instantly recovered their senses and
sprang after the car, the one nearest her reaching for the wheel.
Cameron, leaning forward, sent him rolling down the gully, and Ruth
turned the car sharply to avoid the other car which was occupying as much
of the road as possible, and left the third man scrambling to his knees
behind her. It was taking a big chance to dash past that car in the
narrow space over rough ground, but Ruth was not conscious of anything
but the necessity of getting away. In an instant they were back in the
road and flashing along through the dark.

"Mother, you better let me help you back here," said her son leaning
forward and almost lifting his mother into the back seat, then stepping
over to take her place beside Ruth.

"Better turn out your back lights!" he said in a quiet, steady voice.
"They might follow, you know. They're in an ugly mood. They've been
drinking."

"Then the car isn't really out of commission?"

"Not seriously."

"We're not on the right road, did you know? This road goes to The Pine
Tree Inn and Singleton!"

Cameron gave a low exclamation:

"Then they're headed for more liquor. I thought something was up."

"Is there a cross road back to the Pike?"

"I'm not sure. Probably. I know there is about three miles farther on,
almost to the Inn. This is an awful mess to have got you into! I'd rather
have been in the guard house than have this happen to you!"

"Please don't!" said Ruth earnestly. "It's an adventure! I'm enjoying it.
I'm not a doll to be kept in cotton wool!"

"I should say not!" said Cameron with deep admiration in his tone. "You
haven't shown yourself much of a doll to-night. Some doll, to run a car
the way you did in the face of all that. I'll tell you better what I
think when we get out of this!"

"They are coming, I believe!" said Ruth glancing back. "Don't you see a
light? Look!"

Mrs. Cameron was looking, too, through the little back window. Now she
spoke quietly:

"Wouldn't it be better to get out and slip up in the woods till they have
gone by?"

"No, mother!" said Cameron quickly, "just you sit quiet where you are and
trust us."

"Something awful might happen, John!"

"No, mother! Don't you worry!" he said in his gentle, manly tone. Then to
Ruth: "There's a big barn ahead there on your left. Keep your eye out for
a road around behind it. If we could disappear it's too dark for them to
know where we are. Would you care to turn out all the lights and let me
run the car? I don't want to boast but there isn't much of anything I
can't do with a car when I have to."

Instantly Ruth switched out every light and with a relieved "Please!"
gave up the wheel to him. They made the change swiftly and silently, and
Ruth took the post of lookout.

"Yes, I can see two lights. It might be someone else, mightn't it?"

"Not likely, on this road. But we're not taking any chances," and with
that the car bumped down across a gully and lurched up to a grassy
approach to a big stone barn that loomed above them, then slid down
another bank and passed close to a great haystack, whose clutching straw
fingers reached out to brush their faces, and so swept softly around to
the rear of the barn and stopped. Cameron shut off the engine instantly
and they sat in utter silence listening to the oncoming car.

"It's they, all right!" whispered Cameron softly. "That's Passmore's
voice. He converses almost wholly in choice profanity."

His mother's hand stole out to touch his shoulder and he reached around
and held it close.

"Don't tremble, mother, we're all safe!" he whispered in a tone so tender
that Ruth felt a shiver of pleasure pass over her for the mother who had
such a son. Also there was the instant thought that a man could not be
wholly "rotten" when he could speak to his mother in that tone.

There was a breathless space when the car paused on the road not far away
and their pursuers stood up and looked around, shouting to one another.
There was no mistaking their identity now. Ruth shivered visibly. One of
them got out of the car and came toward the barn. They could hear him
stepping over the stony roadside. Cameron laid a quiet hand of reassuring
protection on her arm that steadied her and made her feel wonderfully
safe once more, and strange to say she found herself lifting up another
queer little kind of a prayer. It had never been her habit to pray much
except in form. Her heart had seldom needed anything that money could not
supply.

The man had stumbled across the gully and up toward the barn. They could
hear him swearing at the unevenness of the ground, and Ruth held her
breath and prayed again. A moment more and he was fumbling about for the
barn door and calling for a flash light. Then, like the distant sound of
a mighty angel of deliverance came the rumble of a car in the distance.
The men heard it and took it for their quarry on ahead. They climbed into
their car again and were gone like a flash.

John Cameron did not wait for them to get far away. He set the car in
motion as soon as they were out of sight, and its expensive mechanism
obeyed his direction almost silently as he guided it around the barn,
behind the haystack and back again into the road over which they had just
come.

"Now!" he said as he put the car to its best speed and switched on its
headlights again. "Now we can beat them to it, I guess, if they come back
this way, which I don't think they will."

The car dashed over the ground and the three sat silent while they passed
into the woods and over the place where they had first met Cameron. Ruth
felt herself trembling again, and her teeth beginning to chatter from the
strain. Cameron seemed to realize her feeling and turned toward her:

"You've been wonderful!" he said flashing a warm look at her, "and you,
too, mother!" lifting his voice a little and turning his head toward the
back seat. "I don't believe any other two women in Bryne Haven could have
gone through a scene like that and kept absolutely still. You were
great!" There was that in his voice that lifted Ruth's heart more than
any praise she had ever received for anything. She wanted to make some
acknowledgment, but she found to her surprise that tears were choking her
throat so that she could not speak. It was the excitement, of course, she
told herself, and struggled to get control of her emotion.

They emerged from the woods and in sight of the Pike at last, and Cameron
drew a long breath of relief.

"There, I guess we can hold our own with anyone, now," he said settling
back in his seat, but relaxing none of his vigilance toward the car which
sped along the highway like a winged thing. "But it's time I heard how
you came to be here. I haven't been able to explain it, during the
intervals when I've had any chance at all to think about it."

"Oh, I just called up your mother to know if it would help you any to be
taken to your train," said Ruth quickly, "and she mentioned that she was
worried lest you would miss it; so I suggested that we try to catch you
and take you on to Wilmington or Baltimore or wherever you have to go. I
do hope this delay hasn't spoiled it all. How long does it take to go
from Baltimore to camp. I've taken the Baltimore trip myself in five
hours. It's only quarter past six yet, do you think we can make it?"

"But you can't go all the way to Baltimore!" he exclaimed. "What would
you and mother do at that time of night alone after I go to camp? You
see, it isn't as if I could stay and come back with you."

"Oh, we'll just go to a hotel in Baltimore, won't we, Mrs. Cameron? We'll
be all right if we only get you safe to camp. Do you think we can do it?"

"Oh, yes, we can do it all right with this car. But I'm quite sure I
ought not to let you do it just for me. What will your people think?"

"I've left word that I've gone to a friend in trouble," twinkled Ruth.
"I'll call them up when I get to Baltimore, and make it all right with
Auntie. She will trust me."

Cameron turned and looked at her wonderingly, reverently.

"It's wonderful that you should do this for me," he said in a low tone,
quite low, so that the watching wistful mother could not even guess what
he was saying.

"It's not in the least wonderful," said Ruth brightly. "Remember the
hedge and Chuck Woodcock!" She was beginning to get her self possession
again.

"You are paying that old score back in compound interest," said Cameron.

That was a wonderful ride rushing along beneath the stars, going back to
childhood's days and getting acquainted again where they left off. Ruth
forgot all about the cause of her wild chase, and the two young men she
had left disconsolate in her library at home; forgot her own world in
this new beautiful one, wherein her spirit really communed with another
spirit; forgot utterly what Wainwright had said about Cameron as more and
more through their talk she came to see the fineness of his character.

They flashed on from one little village to another, leaving one
clustering glimmer of lights in the distance only to pass to other
clustering groups. It was in their favor that there were not many other
travellers to dispute their way, and they were hindered very little.
Cameron had made the trip many times and knew the roads well. They did
not have to hesitate and enquire the way. They made good time. The clocks
were striking ten when they reached the outskirts of Baltimore.

"Now," said Ruth in a sweetly imperious tone, consulting her timepiece to
be sure she had counted the clock strokes correctly, "do you know what
you are going to do, Mr. Corporal? You are going to land your mother and
me at the nearest hotel, and take the car with you back to camp. You said
one of the fellows had his car down there, so I'm sure you'll be able to
find a place to put it over night. If you find a way to send the car back
to us in the morning, well and good. If not your mother and I will go
home by train and the chauffeur can come down to-morrow and bring back
the car; or, better still, you can drive yourself up the next time you
get leave off."

There was much argument about the matter within a brief space of time,
but in the end (which came in five minutes) Ruth had her way, and the
young soldier departed for his camp in the gray car with ample time to
make the short trip, leaving his mother and Ruth at a Baltimore hotel;
after having promised to call up in the morning and let them know what he
could do about the car.

Ruth selected a large double room and went at once to the telephone to
call up her aunt. She found to her relief that that good lady had not yet
returned from her day with a friend in the city, so that no explanations
would be necessary that night. She left word with the servant that she
was in Baltimore with a friend and would probably be at home the next day
sometime. Then she turned to find to her dismay that her companion was
sitting in a low-armed chair with tears running down her cheeks.

"Oh, my dear!" she exclaimed rushing over to her, "you are all worn out!"

"Not a bit of it!" sobbed the mother with a smile like sunshine through
her tears. "I was so happy I couldn't keep from crying. Don't you ever
get that way? I've just been watching you and thinking what a dear
beautiful child you are and how wonderful God has been to send you to
help my boy. Oh, it was so dreadful to me to think of him going down to
camp with those men! My dear, I smelt liquor on their breath when they
came for him, and I was just crying and praying about it when you called
me up. Of course, I knew my boy wouldn't drink, but so many accidents can
happen with automobiles when the driver is drunk! My dear, I never can
thank you enough!"

They were both too excited to sleep soon, but long after the mother was
asleep Ruth lay awake going over the whole day and wondering. There were
so many things about the incident of the afternoon and evening, now that
they were over, that were utterly out of accord with her whole life
heretofore. She felt intuitively that her aunt would never understand if
she were to explain the whole proceeding. There were so many laws of her
little world of conventionalities that she had transgressed, and so many
qualms of a belated conscience about whether she ought to have done it at
all. What would Cameron think of her, anyway? Her cheeks burned hot in
the dark over that question. Strange she had not thought of it at all
either beforehand or while she sat beside him during that wonderful ride!
And now the thing that Wainwright had said shouted itself out to her
ears: "Rotten! Rotten! Rotten!" like a dirge. Suppose he were? It
_couldn't_ be true. It _just couldn't_, but suppose he were? Well,
suppose he were! How was she hurt by doing a kind act? Having taken that
stand against all her former ideas Ruth had instant peace and drifted
into dreams of what she had been enjoying, the way suddenly lit by a
sleepy remembrance of Wetherill's declaration: "He won't drink! You can't
make him! It's been tried again and again!" There was evidence in his
favor. Why hadn't she remembered that before? And his mother! She had
been so sure of him!

The telephone bell wakened her with a message from camp. His voice
greeted her pleasantly with the word that it was all right, he had
reached camp in plenty of time, found a good place for the car, and it
would be at the hotel at nine o'clock. Ruth turned from the phone with a
vague disappointment. He had not said a word of thanks or good-bye or
anything, only that he must hurry. Not even a word to his mother. But
then, of course, men did not think of those little things, perhaps, as
women did, and maybe it was just as well for him to take it all as a
matter of course. It made it less embarrassing for her.

But when they went down to the car, behold he was in it!

"I got leave off for the morning," he explained smiling. "I told my
captain all about how you got me back in time when I'd missed the train
and he told me to see you as far as Wilmington and catch the noon train
back from there. He's a peach of a captain. If my lieutenant had been
there I wouldn't have got a chance to ask him. I was afraid of that last
night. But for good luck the lieutenant has a two days' leave this time.
He's a mess!"

Ruth looked at him musingly. Was Harry Wainwright the lieutenant?

They had a golden morning together, and talked of many things that welded
a friendship already well begun.

"Weren't you at all frightened last night?" asked Cameron once, looking
at the delicate beauty of the face beside him and noting the strength and
sweetness of it.

Mrs. Cameron was dozing in the back seat and they felt quite alone and
free. Ruth looked up at him frankly:

"Why, yes, I think I was for a minute or two while we were behind that
barn, but----Did you ever pray when you were in a trying situation?"

He looked down earnestly into her face, half startled at her words:

"Why, I don't know that I ever did. I'm not quite sure if it was
praying."

"Well, I don't know that I ever did before," she went on thoughtfully,
"but last night when those men got out of their car in front of the barn
so near us again, I found myself praying." She dropped her eyes half
embarrassed: "Just as if I were a frightened little child I found myself
saying: 'God help us! God help us!' And right away we heard that other
car coming and the men went away. It somehow seemed--well, strange! I
wondered if anybody else ever had an experience like that."

"I've heard of them," said Cameron gravely. "I've wondered sometimes
myself. Do you believe in God?"

"Oh, yes!" said Ruth quite firmly. "Of course. What use would there be in
anything if there wasn't a God?"

"But do you believe we humans can ever really--well, _find_ Him? On this
earth, I mean."

"Why, I don't know that I ever thought about it," she answered
bewildered. "Find Him? In what way do you mean?"

"Why, get in touch with Him? Get to know Him, perhaps. Be on such terms
with Him that one could call out in a time like last night, you know;
or--well, say in a battle! I've been thinking a lot about that
lately--naturally."

"Oh!" gasped Ruth softly, "of course. I hadn't thought about that much,
either. We've been so thoughtless--and--and sort of happy you know, just
like butterflies, we girls! I haven't realized that men were going out to
face _Death_!"

"It isn't that I'm afraid to die," said Cameron proudly lifting his chin
as if dying were a small matter, "not just the dying part. I reckon I've
been through worse than that a dozen times. That wouldn't last long.
It's--the other part. I have a feeling there'll be a little something
more expected of me than just to have tried to get the most fun out of
life. I've been thinking if there is a God He'd expect us to find it out
and make things straight between us somehow. I suppose I don't make
myself very plain. I don't believe I know myself just what I mean."

"I think I understand just a little," said Ruth, "I have never thought
about it before, but I'm going to now. It's something we ought to think
about, I guess. In a sense it's something that each one of us has to
think, whether we are going into battle or not, isn't it?"

"I suppose it is, only we never realize it when things are going along
all right," said Cameron. "It seems queer that everybody that's ever
lived on this earth has had this question to face sooner or later and
most of them haven't done much about it. The few people who profess to
have found a way to meet it we call cranks, or else pick flaws in the way
they live; although it does seem to me that if I really found God so I
was sure He was there and cared about me, I'd manage to live a little
decenter life than some do."

They drifted into other topics and all too soon they reached Wilmington
and had to say good-bye. But the thought stayed with Ruth more or less
during the days that followed, and crept into her letters when she wrote
to Corporal Cameron, as she did quite often in these days; and still no
solution had come to the great question which was so like the one of old,
"What shall I do to be saved?" It came and went during the days that
followed, and now and again the fact that it had originated in a talk
with Cameron clashed badly in her mind with that word "Rotten" that
Wainwright had used about him. So that at last she resolved to talk to
her cousin, Captain La Rue, the next time he came up.

"Cousin Captain," she said, "do you know a boy at your camp from Bryne
Haven named John Cameron?"

"Indeed I do!" said the captain.

"What kind of a man is he?"

"The best young man I know in every way," answered the captain promptly.
"If the world were made up of men like him it would be a pretty good
place in which to live. Do you know him?"

"A little," said Ruth evasively, with a satisfied smile on her lips. "His
mother is in our Red Cross now. She thinks he's about right, of course,
but mothers usually do, I guess. I'll have to tell her what you said. It
will please her. He used to be in school with me years ago. I haven't
seen much of him since."

"Well, all I have to say is, improve your acquaintance if you get the
chance. He's worth ten to one of your society youths that loll around
here almost every time I come."

"Now, Cousin Captain!" chided Ruth. But she went off smiling and she kept
all his words in her heart.

XII

Corporal Cameron did not soon return to his native town. An epidemic of
measles broke out in camp just before Thanksgiving and pursued its
tantalizing course through his special barracks with strenuous vigor.
Quarantine was put on for three weeks, and was but lifted for a few hours
when a new batch of cases came down. Seven weeks more of isolation
followed, when the men were not allowed away from the barracks except for
long lonely walks, or gallops across camp. Even the mild excitements of
the Y.M.C.A. huts were not for them in these days. They were much shut up
to themselves, and latent tendencies broke loose and ran riot. Shooting
crap became a passion. They gambled as long as they had a dollar left or
could get credit on the next month's pay day. Then they gambled for their
shirts and their bayonets. All day long whenever they were in the
barracks, you could hear the rattle of the dice, and the familiar call of
"Phoebe," "Big Dick," "Big Nick," and "Little Joe." When they were not on
drill the men would infest the barracks for hours at a time, gathered in
crouching groups about the dice, the air thick and blue with cigarette
smoke; while others had nothing better to do than to sprawl on their cots
and talk; and from their talk Cameron often turned away nauseated. The
low ideals, the open boasting of shame, the matter-of-course conviction
that all men and most women were as bad as themselves, filled him with a
deep boiling rage, and he would close his book or throw down the paper
with which he was trying to while the hour, and fling forth into the cold
air for a solitary ride or walk.

He was sitting thus a cold cheerless December day with a French book he
had recently sent for, trying to study a little and prepare himself for
the new country to which he was soon going.

The door of the barracks opened letting in a rush of cold air, and closed
again quickly. A tall man in uniform with the red triangle on his arm
stood pulling off his woolen gloves and looking about him. Nobody paid
any attention to him. Cameron was deep in his book and did not even
notice him. Off at his left a new crap game was just starting. The
phraseology beat upon his accustomed ears like the buzz of bees or
mosquitos.

"I'll shoot a buck!"

"You're faded!"

"Come on now there, dice! Remember the baby's shoes!"

Cameron had ceased to hear the voices. He was struggling with a difficult
French idiom.

The stranger took his bearings deliberately and walked over to Cameron,
sitting down with a friendly air on the nearest cot.

"Would you be interested in having one of my little books?" he asked, and
his voice had a clear ring that brought Cameron's thoughts back to the
barracks again. He looked up for a curt refusal. He did not wish to be
bothered now, but something in the young man's earnest face held him.
Y.M.C.A. men in general were well enough, but Cameron wasn't crazy about
them, especially when they were young. But this one had a look about him
that proclaimed him neither a slacker nor a sissy. Cameron hesitated:

"What kind of a book?" he asked in a somewhat curt manner.

The boy, for he was only a boy though he was tall as a man, did not hedge
but went straight to the point, looking eagerly at the soldier:

"A pocket Testament," he said earnestly, and laid in Cameron's hand a
little book with limp leather covers. Cameron took it up half curiously,
and then looked into the other's face almost coldly.

"You selling them?" There was a covert sneer in his tone.

"No, no!" said the other quickly, "I'm giving them away for a promise.
You see, I had an accident and one of my eyes was put out a while ago. Of
course, they wouldn't take me for a soldier, and the next best thing was
to be all the help I could to the fellows that are going to fight. I
figure that book is the best thing I can bring you."

The manly simplicity of the boy held Cameron's gaze firmly fixed.

"H'm! In what way?" Cameron was turning the leaves curiously, enjoying
the silky fineness and the clear-cut print and soft leather binding. Life
in the barracks was so much in the rough that any bit of refinement was
doubly appreciated. He liked the feel of the little book and had a
curious longing to be its possessor.

"Why, it gives you a pretty straight line on where we're all going, what
is expected of us, and how we're to be looked out for. It shows one how
to know God and be ready to meet death if we have to."

"What makes you think anyone can know God on this earth?" asked Cameron
sharply.

"Because _I_ have," said the astonishing young man quite as if he were
saying he were related to the President or something like that.

"You have! How did you get to know Him?"

"Through that little book and by following its teachings."

Cameron turned over the pages again, catching familiar phrases here and
there as he had heard them sometimes in Sunday school years ago.

"You said something about a promise. What was it?"

"That you'll carry the book with you always, and read at least a verse in
it every day."

"Well, that doesn't sound hard," mused Cameron. "I guess I could stand
for that."

"The book is yours, then. Would you like to put your name to that
acceptance card in the front of the book?"

"What's that?" asked Cameron sharply as if he had discovered the fly in
the ointment for which he had all along been suspicious.

"Well, I call it the first step in knowing God. It's your act of
acceptance of the way God has planned for you to be forgiven and saved
from sin. If you sign that you say you will accept Christ as your
Saviour."

"But suppose you don't believe in Christ? I can't commit myself to
anything like that till I know about it?"

"Well, you see, that's the first move in getting to know God," said the
stranger with a smile. "God says he wants you to believe in his Son. He
asks that much of you if you want to get to know Him."

Cameron looked at him with bewildered interest. Was here a possible
answer to the questions of his heart. Why did this curious boy have a
light in his face that never came from earth or air? What was there about
his simple earnestness that was so convincing?

Another crap game had started up on the other side of them. A musically
inclined private was playing ragtime on the piano, and another was trying
to accompany him on the banjo. The air was hazier than ever. It seemed
strange to be talking of such things in these surroundings:

"Let's get out of here and walk!" said Cameron, "I'd like to understand
what you mean."

For two hours they tramped across the frozen ground and talked, arguing
this way and that, much drawn toward one another. At last in the solemn
background of a wall of whispering pines that shut them away from the
stark gray rows of barracks, Cameron took out his fountain pen and with
his foot on a prone log, opened the little book on his knee and wrote his
name and the date. Then he put it in his breast pocket with the solemn
feeling that he had taken some kind of a great step toward what his soul
had been longing to find. They knelt on the frozen ground beside that log
and the stranger prayed simply as if he were talking to a friend.
Thereafter that spot was hallowed ground to Cameron, to which he came
often to think and to read his little book.

That night he wrote to Ruth, telling in a shy way of his meeting with the
Testament man and about the little book. After he had mailed the letter
he walked back again to the spot among the pines and standing there
looked up to the stars and somehow committed himself again to the
covenant he had signed in the little book. It was then that he decided
that if he got home again after quarantine before he went over, he would
unite with the church. Somehow the stranger's talk that afternoon had
cleared away his objections. On his way back to the barracks across the
open field, up through the woods and over the crest of the hill toward
the road as he walked thinking deeply, suddenly from down below on the
road a familiar voice floated up to him. He parted the branches of oak
underbrush that made a screen between him and the road and glanced down
to get his bearings the better to avoid an unwelcome meeting. It was
inevitable when one came near Lieutenant Wainwright that he would
overhear some part of a conversation for he had a carrying voice which he
never sought to restrain.

"You're sure she's a girl with pep, are you? I don't want to bother with
any other kind. All right. Tell her to wait for me in the Washington
station to-morrow evening at eight. I'll look for her at the right of the
information booth. Tell her to wear a red carnation so I'll know her.
I'll show her a good time, all right, if she's the right sort. I'll trust
you that she's a good looker!"

Cameron could not hear the response, but the two were standing
silhouetted against a distant light, and something in the attitude of the
other man held his attention. For a moment he could not place him, then
it flashed across his mind that this was the soldier Chambers, who had
been the means of his missing the train at Chester on the memorable
occasion when Ruth Macdonald had saved the day. It struck him as a
strange thing that these two enemies of his whom he would have supposed
to be strangers to one another should be talking thus intimately. To make
sure of the man's identity he waited until the two parted and Wainwright
went his way, and then at a distance followed the other one until he was
quite certain. He walked back thoughtfully trying to make it out. Had
Wainwright then been at the bottom of his trouble that day? It began to
seem quite possible. And how had Ruth Macdonald happened to be so
opportunely present at the right moment? How had she happened to turn
down that road, a road that was seldom used by people going to Baltimore?
It was all very strange and had never been satisfactorily explained. Ruth
had evaded the question most plausibly every time he had brought it up.
Could it be that Wainwright had told her of a plot against him and she
had reached out to help him? His heart leaped at the thought. Then at
once he was sure that Wainwright had never told her, unless perhaps he
had told some tale against him, and made him the butt of a great joke.
Well, if he had she had cared enough to defend him and help him out
without ever giving away the fact that she knew. But here, too, lay a
thorn to disturb him. Why had Ruth Macdonald not told him the plain truth
if she knew? Was she trying to shield Harry Wainwright? Could she really
care for that contemptible scoundrel?

The thought in all its phases tore his mind and kept him awake for hours,
for the crux of the whole matter was that he was afraid that Ruth
Macdonald was going to marry Lieutenant Wainwright, and he knew that it
was not only for her sake, but for his also that he did not want
this--that it was agony even to contemplate.

He told himself, of course, that his interest was utterly unselfish. That
she was nothing to him but a friend and never would be, and that while it
might be hard to see her belong to some fine man and know he never might
be more than a passing friend, still it would not be like seeing her tied
to a rotten unprincipled fellow like Wainwright. The queer part of it was
that the word "rotten" in connection with his enemy played a great part
in his thoughts that night.

Somewhere in the watches of the night a memory came to him of the
covenant he had made that day and a vague wistful reaching of his heart
after the Christ to whom he was supposed to have surrendered his life. He
wondered if a Christ such as the stranger had claimed He had, would take
an interest in the affairs of Ruth Macdonald. Surely, such a flower of a
girl would be protected if there was protection for anyone! And somehow
he managed a queer little prayer for her, the first he had tried to put
up. It helped him a little, and toward morning he fell asleep.

A few days later in glancing through his newly acquired Testament he came
upon a verse which greatly troubled him for a time. His eye had caught it
at random and somehow it lodged in his mind:

"Forbearing one another, and forgiving one another, if any man have a
quarrel against any: even as Christ forgave you, so also do ye."

Somehow the principle of that verse did not fit with his proud spirit. He
thought instantly of Wainwright's distasteful face and form. It seemed to
loom before him with a smug triumphal sneer. His enmity toward the fellow
had been of years standing, and had been deepened many times by
unforgetable acts. There was nothing about Wainwright to make one forgive
him. There was everything about him to make one want to punish him. When
the verse first confronted Ca

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