Yet Ruth did not neglect the small and seemingly unimportant duties right at hand. She was no dreamer or dallier. Having got off this big box of comforts for the boys at the front, the very next day she, with Helen, took up the effort already begun of a house-to-house campaign throughout Cheslow for Red Cross members, and to invite the feminine part of the community to aid in a big drive for knitted goods.
The Ladies’ Aid Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church was meeting that day with Mrs. Curtis, the wife of the railroad station agent and the mother of one of Ruth’s friends at boarding school. Mercy Curtis, having quite outgrown her childish ills, welcomed the friends when they rang the bell.
“Do come in and help me bear the chatter of this flock of starlings,” Mercy said. “Glad to see you, girlies!” and she kissed both Ruth and Helen.
“But I am afraid I want to join the starlings, as you call them,” Ruth said demurely; “and even add to their chatter. I came here for just that purpose.”
“For just what purpose?” Mercy demanded.
“To talk to them. I knew the crowd would be here, and so I thought I could kill two birds with one stone.”
“Two birds, only?” sniffed Mercy. “Kill ’em all, for all I care! I’ll run and find you some stones.”
“My ammunition are hard words only,” laughed Ruth. “I want to tell them that they are not doing their share for the Red Cross.”
“Oh!” exclaimed Mercy. “Humph! Well, Ruthie, you have come at an unseasonable time, I fear. Mrs. Mantel is here.”
“Mrs. Mantel!” murmured Ruth.
“The woman in black!” exclaimed Helen. “Well, Mercy, what has she been saying?”
“Enough, I think,” the other girl replied. “At least, I have an idea that most of the women in the Ladies’ Aid believe that it is better to go on with the usual sewing and foreign and domestic mission work, and let the Red Cross strictly alone.”
CHAPTER III – THE WOMAN IN BLACK
“Do you mean to say,” demanded Helen Cameron, with some anger, “that they have no interest in the war, or in our boys who will soon begin to go over there? Impossible!”
“I repeat that,” said Ruth. “‘Impossible,’ indeed.”
“Oh, each may knit for her own kin or for other organizations,” Mercy said. “I am repeating what I have just heard, that is all. Girls! I am just boiling!”
“I can imagine it,” Helen said. “I am beginning to simmer myself.”
“Wait. Let us be calm,” urged Ruth, smiling as she laid off her things, preparatory to going into the large front room where Mrs. Curtis was entertaining the Ladies’ Aid Society.
“Is it all because of that woman in black?” demanded Helen.
“Well, she has been pointing out that the Red Cross is a great money-making scheme, and that it really doesn’t need our small contributions.”
“And she is a member herself!” snapped Helen.
“Well, she joined, of course, because she did not want anybody to think she wasn’t patriotic,” scoffed Mercy. “That is the way she puts it. But you ought to hear the stories she has been telling these poor, simple women.”
“Did you ever!” cried Helen angrily.
“It is well we came here,” Ruth said firmly. “Let me into the lions’ den, Mercy.”
“I am afraid they are another breed of cats. There is little noble or lionlike about some of them.”
Ruth and Helen were quite used to Mercy Curtis’ sharp tongue. It was well known. But it was evident, too, that the girl had been roused to fury by what she had heard at the meeting of the Ladies’ Aid Society.
The ladies of the church society were, for the most part, very good people indeed. But at this time the war was by no means popular in Cheslow (as it was not in many places) and the plague of pacifism, if not actually downright pro-German propaganda, was active and malignant.
When the door into the big front room was opened and the girls entered, Mrs. Curtis rose hastily to welcome Ruth and Helen warmly. The women were, for the most part, busily sewing. But, of course, that puts no brake upon the activities of the tongue. Indeed, the needle seems to be particularly helpful as an accompaniment to a “dish of gossip.”
“I still think it is terrible,” one woman was saying quite earnestly to another, who was one of the few idle women in the room, “if an organization like that cannot be trusted.”
The idle woman was dressed plainly but elegantly in black, with just a touch of white at wrists and throat. She was a graceful woman, tall, not yet forty, and with a set smile on her face that might have been the outward sign of a sweet temperament, and then —
“Mrs. Mantel!” whispered Helen to Ruth. “I do not like her one bit. And nobody knows where she came from or who she is. Cheslow has only been her abiding place since we went to college last autumn.”
“Sh!” whispered Ruth in return. “I am interested.”
“Oh, I assure you, my dear Mrs. Crothers, that it may not be the organization’s fault,” purred the woman in black. “The objects of the Red Cross are very worthy. None more so. But in certain places – locally, you know – of course I don’t mean here in Cheslow —
“Yet I could tell you of something that happened to me to-day. I was quite hurt – quite shocked, indeed. I saw on the street a sweater that I knitted myself last winter.”
“Oh! On a soldier?” asked another of the women who heard. “How nice!”
“No, indeed. No soldier,” said Mrs. Mantel quickly. “On a girl. Fancy! On a girl I had never seen before. And I gave that to the Red Cross with my own hands.”
“Perhaps it belonged to the girl’s brother,” another of the women observed.
“Oh, no!” Mrs. Mantel was eager to say. “I asked her. Naturally I was curious – very curious. I said to her, ‘Where did you get the sweater, my girl, if you will pardon my asking?’ And she told me she bought it in a store here in Cheslow.”
“Oh, my!” gasped another of the group.
“Do you mean to say the Red Cross sells the things people knit for them?” cried Mrs. Crothers.
“How horrid!” drawled another. “Well, you never can tell about these charitable organizations that are not connected with the church.”
Ruth Fielding broke her silence and quite calmly asked:
“Will you tell me who the girl was and where she said she bought the sweater, Mrs. Mantel?”
“Oh, I never saw the girl before,” said the lady in black.
“But she told you the name of the store where she said she purchased it?”
“No-o. What does it matter? I recognized my own sweater!” exclaimed the woman in black, with a toss of her head.
“Are you quite sure, Mrs. Mantel,” pursued the girl of the Red Mill insistently but quite calmly, “that you could not have made a mistake?”
“Mistake? How?” snapped the other.
“Regarding the identity of the sweater.”
“I tell you I recognized it. I know I knitted it. I certainly know my own work. And why should I be cross-questioned, please?”
“My name is Ruth Fielding,” Ruth explained. “I happen to have at present a very deep interest in the Red Cross work – especially in our local chapter. Did you give your sweater to our local chapter?”
“Why – no. But what does that matter?” and the woman in black began to show anger. “Do you doubt my word?”
“You