“My goodness, girl!” cried Ruth. “You don’t have to make a tank of yourself, do you? Exercise——”
“Now stop right there, Ruth Fielding!” cried Jennie Stone, with flashing eyes. “You have as little sense as the rest of these people. They tell me to exercise, and don’t you know that every time I go horseback riding, or do anything else of a violent nature, that I have to come right back and eat enough victuals to put on twice the number of pounds the exercise is supposed to take off? Don’t—tell—me! It’s impossible to reduce and keep one’s health.”
Jennie was doing something besides putting on flesh, however. Her practical work in the diet kitchen Ruth saw was worthy, indeed.
The girl of the Red Mill could not see Helen at this time, but she believed her chum and Mr. Cameron would look her up, wherever the supply unit to which Ruth belonged was ultimately assigned.
She received a letter from Tom Cameron about this time, too, and found that he was hard at work in a camp right behind the French lines and had already made one step in the line of progress, being now a first lieutenant. He expected, with his force of Pershing’s boys, to go into the trenches for the first time within a fortnight.
She wished she might see Tom again before his battalion went into action; but she was under command of the Red Cross; and, in any case, she could not have got her passport viséed for the front. Mr. Cameron, as a representative of the United States Government, with Helen, had been able to visit Tom in the training camp over here.
Ruth wrote, however—wrote a letter that Tom slipped into the little leather pouch he wore inside his shirt, and which he would surely have with him when he endured his first round of duty in the trenches. With the verities of life and death so near to them, these young people were very serious, indeed.
Yet the note of cheerfulness was never lost among the workers of the Red Cross with whom Ruth Fielding daily associated. While she waited for her unit to be assigned to its place the girl of the Red Mill did not waste her time. There was always something to see and something to learn.
When congregated at the headquarters of the Supply Department one day, the unit was suddenly notified that their new chief had arrived. They gathered quickly in the reception room and soon a number of Red Cross officials entered, headed by one in a major’s uniform and with several medals on the breast of his coat. He was a medical army officer in addition to being a Red Cross commissioner.
“The ladies of our new base supply unit,” said the commissioner, introducing the workers, “already assigned to Lyse. That was decided last evening.