The Story of the Red Cross as told to The Little Colonel Part 3

"I cannot take Hero with me to the hospital, so I shall leave him behind with some one who will care for him and love him, perhaps even better than I have done." He held out his hand to the dog.

"Come, Hero, my dear old comrade, come bid thy master farewell."

Fumbling under his pillow as he spoke, he took out a small leather case, and, opening it, held up a medal. It was the medal that had been given him for bravery on the field of battle.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "HE FASTENED THE MEDAL TO HERO'S COLLAR"]

"It is my one treasure!" murmured the old soldier, turning it fondly, as it lay in his palm. "I have no family to whom I can leave it as an heirloom, but thou hast twice earned the right to wear it. I have no fear but that thou wilt always be true to the Red Cross and thy name of Hero, so thou shalt wear thy country's medal to thy grave."

He fastened the medal to Hero's collar, then, with the dog's great head pressed fondly against him, he began talking to him in the speech Lloyd could not understand, but the sight of the gray-haired old soldier taking his last leave of his faithful friend brought the tears to her eyes.

Then he called her to him and said that because she was like his little Christine, he knew that she would be good to Hero, and he asked her to take him back to America with her. She promised that she would. Then he put Hero's paw in her hand, and said, "Hero, I give thee to thy little mistress. Protect and guard her always, as she will love and care for thee."

CHAPTER IV

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 s.h.i.+pboard.

Instead of being confined to the hold, he was given the liberty of the s.h.i.+p, and when his story was known he received as much flattering attention as if he had been some t.i.tled n.o.bleman.

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 s.h.i.+p 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 pa.s.sengers 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 pa.s.sed 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, las.h.i.+ng 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 bra.s.sard 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 pa.s.s 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 grat.i.tude. 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 sh.o.r.e. 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.

CHAPTER V

IN AFTER YEARS

Time flies fast under the Locusts. The sixteen years which have pa.s.sed since Hero followed his little mistress home have brought many changes.

He is only a tender memory now. A square, white stone stands on the lawn where "taps" were sounded over him one September day, long ago. But the sight of it no longer brings pain to the Little Colonel. With the sweet ambition in her heart to make life happier for every one she touches, she has grown up into a veritable Princess Winsome.

In a home of her own now, to her own little son, she sometimes tells the story that is set down here. He is too young yet, to be told the chapters which have been added since to that amazing history of sacrifice and service. And she cannot say now as the old Major said then--"Wherever the Red Cross goes is safety for the wounded soldiers.

No nurse, surgeon or ambulance bearing that sign can be fired upon."

That part is no longer true, although the day is coming soon when we shall make it true for all time.

She cannot tell him that the very nation which was first and foremost in training such dogs as Hero in service for mankind has violated its treaties and filled the world with horrors and suffering unspeakable.

His trusting baby heart could not understand such treachery. But young as he is he knows what that red and white symbol means.

Because "daddy" wore one on his arm when he marched away with the other soldiers, he must have one on the sleeve of his little blue rompers.

Because "deah muvva" wears one on the veil which binds her forehead, when she comes back from the unit where she has spent long hours away from him, he a.s.sociates it with all that is loveliest to him--her lovely face, her arms that are his peace and comfort and safety, her lips that kiss away all his hurts and make them well.

Long before he is old enough to hear the terrible war-part of the story, War shall be at an end, please G.o.d, and the Red Cross shall mean to the nations left upon the earth what it means to him--arms that enfold a suffering humanity, lips that press a great mother-love to all its hurts and make them well.

THE END.