The Search

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!