HOMEWARD BOUND
On that long journey back to Kentucky it was well for Hero that he wore
the Red Cross on his collar. The little symbol was the open sesame to
many a privilege that ordinary dogs are not allowed on shipboard.
Instead of being confined to the hold, he was given the liberty of the
ship, and when his story was known he received as much flattering
attention as if he had been some titled nobleman.
The captain shook the big white paw, gravely put into his hand at the
Little Colonel's bidding, and then stooped to stroke the dog's head. As
he looked into the wistful, intelligent eyes his own grew tender.
"I have a son in the service," he said, "sent back from South Africa,
covered with scars. I know what that Red Cross meant to him for a good
many long weeks. Go where you like, old fellow! The ship is yours, so
long as you make no trouble."
"Oh, thank you!" cried the Little Colonel, looking up at the big British
captain with a beaming face. "I'd rathah be tied up myself than to have
Hero kept down there in the hold. I'm suah he'll not bothah anybody."
Nor did he. No one from stoker to deck steward could make the slightest
complaint against him, so dignified and well behaved was he. Lloyd was
proud of him and his devotion. Wherever she went he followed her, lying
at her feet when she sat in her steamer-chair, walking close beside her
when she promenaded the deck.
Everybody stopped to speak to him, and to question Lloyd about him, so
that it was not many days before she and the great St. Bernard had made
friends of all the passengers who were able to be on deck.
The hours are long at sea, and people gladly welcome anything that
provides entertainment, so Lloyd was often called aside as she walked,
and invited to join some group, and tell to a knot of interested
listeners all she knew of Hero and the Major, and the training of the
ambulance dogs.
In return Lloyd's stories nearly always called forth some anecdote from
her listeners about the Red Cross work in America, and to her great
surprise she found five persons among them who had met Clara Barton in
some great national calamity of fire, flood, or pestilence.
One was a portly man with a gruff voice, who had passed through the
experiences of the forest fires that swept through Michigan, over twenty
years ago. As he told his story, he made the scenes so real that Lloyd
forgot where she was. She could almost smell the thick, stifling smoke
of the burning forest, hear the terrible crackling of the flames, feel
the scorching heat in her face, and see the frightened cattle driven
into the lakes and streams by the pursuing fire.
She listened with startled eyes as he described the wall of flame,
hemming in the peaceful home where his little son played around the
doorstep. She held her breath while he told of their mad flight from it,
when, lashing his horses into a gallop, he looked back to see it licking
up everything in the world he held dear except the frightened little
family huddled at his feet. He had worked hard to build the cottage. It
was furnished with family heirlooms brought West with them from the old
homestead in Vermont. It was hard to see those great red tongues
devouring it in a mouthful.
In the morning, although they had reached a place of safety, they were
out in a charred, blackened wilderness, without a roof to shelter them,
a chair to sit on, or a crust to eat. "The hardest thing to bear," he
said, "was to hear my little three-year-old Bertie begging for his
breakfast, and to know that there was nothing within miles of us to
satisfy his hunger, and that the next day it would be the same, and the
next, and the next.
"We were powerless to help ourselves. But while we sat there in utter
despair, a neighbor rode by and hailed us. He told us that Red Cross
committees had started out from Milwaukee and Chicago at first tidings
of the fire, with car-loads of supplies, and that if we could go to the
place where they were distributing we could get whatever we needed.
"I wish you could have seen what they were handing out when we got
there: tools and lumber to put up cabins, food and beds and clothes and
coal-oil. They'd thought of everything and provided everything, and they
went about the distributing in a systematic, business-like way that
somehow put heart and cheer into us all.
"They didn't make us feel as if they were handing out alms to paupers,
but as if they were helping some of their own family on to their feet
again, and putting them in shape to help themselves. Even my little
Bertie felt it. Young as he was, he never forgot that awful night when
we fled from the fire, nor the hungry day that followed, nor the fact
that the arm that carried him food, when he got it at last, wore a
brassard marked like that." He touched the Red Cross on Hero's collar.
"And when the chance came to show the same brotherly spirit to some one
else in trouble and pass the help along, he was as ready as the rest of
us to do his share.
"Three years afterward I read in the papers of the floods that had swept
through the Ohio and Mississippi valleys, and of the thousands that were
homeless. Bertie,--he was six then,--he listened to the account of the
children walking the streets, crying because they hadn't a roof over
them or anything to eat. He didn't say a word, but he climbed up to the
mantel and took down his little red savings-bank.
"We were pretty near on our feet again by that time, although we were
still living in a cabin. The crops had been good, and we had been able
to save a little. He poured out all the pennies and nickels in his
bank,--ninety-three cents they came to,--and then he got his only store
toy, a box of tin soldiers that had been sent to him Christmas, and put
that on the table beside the money. We didn't appear to notice what he
was doing. Presently he brought the mittens his grandmother up in
Vermont had knit for him. Then he waited a bit, and seemed to be
weighing something in his mind. By and by he slipped away to the chest
where his Sunday clothes were kept and took them out, new suit, shoes,
cap and all, and laid them on the table with the money and the tin
soldiers.
"'There, daddy,' he said, 'tell the Red Cross people to send them to
some little boy like me, that's been washed out of his home and hasn't
any of his toys left, or his clothes.'
"I tell you it made a lump come up in my throat to see that the little
fellow had taken his very best to pay his debt of gratitude. Nothing was
too great for him to sacrifice. Even his tin soldiers went when he
remembered what the Red Cross had done for him."
"My experience with the Red Cross was in the Mississippi floods of '82,"
said a gentleman who had joined the party. "One winter day we were
attracted by screams out in the river, and found that they came from
some people who were floating down on a house that had been washed away.
There they were, that freezing weather, out in the middle of the river,
their clothes frozen on them, ill from fright and exposure. I went out
in one of the boats that were sent to their rescue, and helped bring
them to shore. I was so impressed by the tales of suffering they told
that I went up the river to investigate.
"At every town, and nearly every steamboat landing, I found men from the
relief committees already at work, distributing supplies. They didn't
stop when they had provided food and clothing. They furnished seed by
the car-load to the farmers, just as in the Galveston disaster, a few
years ago, they furnished thousands of strawberry plants to the people
who were wholly dependent on their crops for their next year's food."
"Where did they get all those stores?" asked Lloyd. "And the seeds and
the strawberry plants?"
"Most of it was donated," answered the gentleman. "Many contributions
come pouring in after such a disaster, just as little Bertie's did. But
the society is busy all the time, collecting and storing away the things
that may be needed at a moment's notice. People would contribute, of
course, even if there were no society to take charge of their donations,
but without its wise hands to distribute, much would be lost."
It was from a sad-faced lady in black, who had had two sons drowned in
the Johnstown flood, that Lloyd heard the description of Clara Barton's
five months' labor there. A doctor's wife who had been in the Mt. Vernon
cyclone, and a newspaper man who had visited the South Carolina islands
after the tidal wave, and Charleston after the earthquake, piled up
their accounts of those scenes of suffering, some of them even greater
than the horrors of war, so that Lloyd dreamed of fires and floods that
night. But the horror of the scenes was less, because a baby voice
called cheerfully through them, "Here, daddy, give these to the poor
little boys that are cold and homesick;" and a great St. Bernard, with a
Red Cross on his back, ran around distributing mittens and tin
soldiers.