II

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.