CHAPTER I—UNCLE JABEZ IS EXCITED


“Oh! Not _Tom_?”

Ruth Fielding looked up from the box she was packing for the local Red
Cross chapter, and, almost horrified, gazed into the black eyes of the
girl who confronted her.

Helen Cameron’s face was tragic in its expression. She had been crying.
The closely written sheets of the letter in her hand were shaken, as
were her shoulders, with the sobs she tried to suppress.

“It—it’s written to father,” Helen said. “He gave it to me to read. I
wish Tom had never gone to Harvard. Those boys there are completely
crazy! To think—at the end of his freshman year—to throw it all up and
go to a training camp!”

“I guess Harvard isn’t to blame,” said Ruth practically. If she was
deeply moved by what her chum had told her, she quickly recovered her
self-control. “The boys are going from other colleges all over the land.
Is Tom going to try for a commission?”

“Yes.”

“What does your father say?”

“Why,” cried the other girl as though that, too, had surprised and hurt
her, “father cried ‘Bully for Tom!’ and then wiped his eyes on his
handkerchief. What can men be made of, Ruth? He knows Tom may be killed,
and yet he cheers for him.”

Ruth Fielding smiled and suddenly hugged Helen. Ruth’s smile was
somewhat tremulous, but her chum did not observe this fact.

“I understand how your father feels, dear. Tom does not want to be
drafted——”

“He wouldn’t be drafted. He is not old enough. And even if they
automatically draft the boys as they become of age, it would be months
before they reached Tom, and the war will be over by that time. But here
he is throwing himself away——”

“Oh, Helen! Not that!” cried Ruth. “Our soldiers will fight for us—for
their country—for honor. And a man’s life lost in such a cause is not
thrown away.”

“That’s the way I feel,” said Helen, more steadily. “Tom is my twin. You
don’t know what it means to have a twin brother, Ruth Fielding.”

“That is true,” sighed Ruth. “But I can imagine how you feel, dear. If
you have hopes of the war’s being over so quickly, then I should expect
Tom back from training camp safe and sound, and with no chance of ever
facing the enemy. Has he really gone?”

“Oh, yes,” Helen told her despondently. “And lots of the boys who used
to go to school with Tom at Seven Oaks. You know, all those jolly
fellows who were at Snow Camp with us, and at Lighthouse Point, and on
Cliff Island, and out West on Silver Ranch—and—and everywhere. Just to
think! We may never see them again.”

“Dear me, Helen,” Ruth urged, “don’t look upon the blackest side of the
cloud. It’s a long time before they go over there.”

“We don’t know how soon they will be in the trenches,” said her friend
hopelessly. “These boys going to war——”

“And I wish I was young enough to go with ’em!” ejaculated a harsh
voice, as the door of the back kitchen opened and the speaker stamped
into the room. “Got that box ready to nail up, Niece Ruth? Ben’s
hitching up the mules, and I want to get to Cheslow before dark.”

“Oh! Almost ready, Uncle Jabez,” cried the girl of the Red Mill, as the
gray old man approached.

He was lean and wiry and the dust of his mill seemed to have been so
ground into his very skin that he was a regular “dusty miller.” His
features were as harsh as his voice, and he was seldom as excited as he
seemed to be now.

“Who’s going to war now?” he asked, turning to Helen.

“Poor—poor Tom!” burst out the black-eyed girl, and began to dabble her
eyes again.

“What’s the matter o’ him?” demanded the old miller.

“He’ll—he’ll be shot—I know he’ll be killed, and mangled horribly!”

“Fiddle-de-dee!” grunted Uncle Jabez, but his tone of voice was not as
harsh as his words sounded. “I never got shot, nor mangled none to speak
of, and I was fightin’ and marchin’ three endurin’ years.”

“_You_, Uncle Jabez?” cried Ruth.