In the Cameron car, which Helen drove so that a chauffeur could be relieved to go into the army, the two girls drove all about the countryside, interesting the scattered families in war work and picking up the knitted goods made in the farmhouses and villages.
In many places they had to combat the same sort of talk that the woman in black was giving forth. Ruth was patient, but very insistent that the Red Cross deserved no such criticism.
“Come into Cheslow and see what we are doing there at our local headquarters. I will take you in and bring you back. I’ll take you to the county headquarters at Robinsburg. You will there hear men and women speak who know much more than I do about the work.”
This was the way she pleaded for fairness and public interest, and a ride in a fine automobile was a temptation to many of the women and girls. An afternoon in the rooms of a live Red Cross chapter usually convinced and converted most of these “Doubting Thomasines,” as Helen called them.
Working with wool and other goods was all right. But money was needed. A country-wide drive was organized, and Ruth was proud that she was appointed on the committee to conduct it. Mr. Cameron, who was a wealthy department store owner in the city, was made chairman of this special committee, and he put much faith in the ability of the girl of the Red Mill and his own daughter to assist materially in the campaign for funds.
“Get hold of every hardshell farmer in the county,” he told the girls. “Begin with your Uncle Jabez, Ruthie. If he leads with a goodly sum many another old fellow who keeps his surplus cash in a stocking or in the broken teapot on the top cupboard shelf will come to time.
“The reason it is so hard to get contributions out of men like Jabez Potter,” said Mr. Cameron with a chuckle, “is because nine times out of ten it means the giving up of actual money. They have their cash hid away. It isn’t making them a penny, but they like to hoard it, and some of ’em actually worship it.
“And not to be wondered at. It comes hard. Their backs are bent and their fingers knotted from the toil of acquiring hard cash, dollar by dollar and cent by cent. It is much easier to write a check for a hundred dollars to give to a good cause than it is to dig right down into one’s jeans and haul out a ten-dollar note.”
Ruth knew just how hard this was going to be – to interest the purses of the farming community in the Red Cross drive. The farmers’ wives and daughters were making their needles fly, but the men merely considered the work something like the usual yearly attempt to get funds out of them for foreign missions.
“I tell ye what, Niece Ruth, I got my doubts,” grumbled Uncle Jabez, when she broached the subject of his giving generously to the cause. “I dunno about so much money being needed for what you’re callin’ the ‘waste of war’!”
“If you read those statistics, compiled under the eyes of Government agents,” she told him, “you must be convinced that it is already proved by what has happened in France and Belgium – and in other countries – during the three years of war, that all this money will be needed, and more.”
“I dunno. Millions! Them is a power of dollars, Niece Ruth. You and lots of other folks air too willing to spend money that other folks have airned by the sweat of their brows.”
He offered her a sum that she was really ashamed to put down at the top of her subscription paper. She went about her task in the hope that Uncle Jabez’s purse and heart would both be opened for the cause.
Not that he was not patriotic. He was willing – indeed anxious – to go to the front and give his body for the cause of liberty. But Uncle Jabez seemed to love his dollars better than he did his body.
“Give him time, dearie, give him time,” murmured Aunt Alvirah, rocking back and forth in her low chair. “The idea of giving up a dollar to Jabez Potter’s mind is bigger than the shooting of a thousand men. Poor boys! Poor boys! How many of them may lack comforts and hospitals while the niggard people like Jabez Potter air wakin’ up?”
Ruth’s heart was very sore about the going over of the American expeditionary forces at this time, too. She said little to Helen about it, but the fact that Tom Cameron – her very oldest friend about the Red Mill and Cheslow – looked forward to going at the first moment possible, brought the war very close to the girl.
The feeling within her that she should go across to France and actually help in some way grew stronger and stronger as the days went by. Then came a letter from Jennie Stone.
“Heavy,” as she had always been called in school and even in college, was such a fun-loving, light-hearted girl that it quite shocked both Ruth and Helen when they learned that she was already in real work for the poor poilus and was then about to sail for France.
Jennie Stone’s people were wealthy, and her social acquaintances were, many of them, idle women and girls. But the war had awakened these drones, and with them the plump girl. An association for the establishment and upkeep of a convalescent home in France had been formed in Jennie’s neighborhood, and Jennie, who had always been fond of cooking – both in the making of the dishes and the assimilation of the same – was actually going to work in the diet kitchen.
“And who knows,” the letter ended in Heavy’s characteristic way, “but that I shall fall in love with one of the blessés. What a sweet name for a wounded soldier! And, just tell me! Do you think it possible? Can a poilu love a fat girl?”
CHAPTER V – “THE BOYS OF THE DRAFT”
“My goodness, Ruth Fielding!” demanded Helen, after reading the characteristic letter from Jennie Stone, “if she can go to France why can’t we?”
Helen’s changed attitude did not surprise her chum much. Ruth was quite used to Helen’s vagaries. The latter was very apt to declare against a course of action, for herself or her friends, and then change over night.
The thought of her twin brother going to war had at first shocked and startled Helen. Now she added:
“For you know very well, Ruth Fielding, that Tom Cameron should not be allowed to go over there to France all alone.”
“Goodness, Helen!” gasped the girl of the Red Mill, “you don’t suppose that Tom is going to constitute an Army of Invasion in his own person, and attempt to whip the whole of Germany before the rest of Uncle Sam’s boys jump in?”
“You may laugh!” cried Helen. “He’s only a boy – and boys can’t get along without somebody to look out for them. He never would change his flannels at the right time, or keep his feet dry.”
“I know you have always felt the overwhelming responsibility of Tom’s upbringing, even when he was at Seven Oaks and you and I were at Briarwood.”
“Every boy needs the oversight of some feminine eye. And I expect he’ll fall in love with the first French girl he meets over there unless I’m on the spot to warn him,” Helen went on.
“They are most attractive, I believe,” laughed Ruth cheerfully.
“‘Chic,’ as Madame Picolet used to say. You remember her, our French teacher at Briarwood?” Helen said.
“Poor little Picolet!” Ruth returned with some gravity. “Do you know she has been writing me?”
“Madame Picolet? You never said a word about it!”
“But you knew she returned to France soon after the war began?”
“Oh, yes. I knew that. But – but, to tell the truth, I hadn’t thought of her at all for a long time. Why does she write to you?”
“For help,” said Ruth quietly. “She has a work among soldiers’ widows and orphans – a very worthy charity, indeed. I looked it up.”
“And sent her money, I bet!” cried the vigorous Helen.
“Why – yes – what I felt I could spare,” Ruth admitted.
“And never told any of us girls about it. Think! All the Briarwood girls who knew little Picolet!” Helen said