the farm to the rocks to pay for it, and the others, the elder brothers who stayed at home to fatten the calves that went to buy the books and the dress suits and sundry incidentals of the college course—they had just as active brains, were just as clear thinkers. The houses were not all painted on the outside, but they had libraries of the choicest things in standard literature, and most of the houses had their bagpipes or a violin. From the time when the long evenings set in in the fall until the spring floods broke up the roads the young men and the girls would gather regularly in some farm house and dance all night. The Highland fling was as well known here as in any home in the hills of the Old Land, and when the whole floor wound up the night in the Scotch reel, the drone of the pipes and the whoops of the dancers seemed a very harmless and picturesque way of keeping alive the traditions of their warrior ancestors.
But they were indeed sons of the Covenanters, and with the first surety of war every man who could get away at all wound up his affairs as fast as he could, or left them incomplete, got into kilts if he could find a Highland regiment not filled up, but in any case got into a uniform of some kind, said good-bye to his women folk or his children, a bit roughly and unsteadily at the last, held them painfully close for a minute, then broke away and left them without looking back. The
whole settlement had been left like that, and the farming was now being done by the old men and the young boys and the women and girls.
But the girls had come from the same strain of Covenanter ancestors. They were tall, deep-bosomed, motherly young women with a strength of will and character in their faces like their brothers—and it was war-time. Just as their great grandmothers must have gathered in the sheep when their war-fired men followed the bagpipes over the hills to meet an enemy before their own hearths were dishonored, so their daughters in Canada, with the enemy far away, but none the less menacing if no one went to meet him, took up the tools their soldiers had laid down, and went to farming. Many of these girls had never lifted an axe or driven three horses on a binder before, but they were doing it now, and doing it fairly well. Not that this was work that any Canadian girl could do. These girls had unusually good physiques to begin with; perhaps the canny forethought of their race had made them judicious in what they attempted to do, and there were usually more than one of them in the house, so they didn’t have to try to crowd a woman’s work into the night after doing a man’s work in the fields all day. Anyway, it was their avowed intention to keep it up “until the men came back.”
In the winter the girls who in other years had
given their evenings entirely to the neighborhood frolics now sat late beside their lamps at home, knitting. In one community it occurred to them that they could work better together, so they formed a “Next o’ Kin Club.” Incidentally they sent for Ruth to come and help them get their work better organized.
It was easy to arrange a plan for the most practical kind of Red Cross work. It was not so easy to look squarely at the problems ahead of most of these girls, and offer any solution. But the girls themselves had gone right to the heart of things.
“We’ve thought it all out,” one girl explained to Ruth, a girl with eyes as soft and blue as the heather and a wealth of bronze hair that would have set an artist raving. She was obviously a girl who in normal times had followed the quick, warm workings of her heart rather than to reason out any logical line of conduct. “We’ve thought it all out, and we want to be ready for whatever happens.
“Andra and I were to have been married in October. At the first word of war he and my brother Donald, a lad just turned eighteen, left together. Father is old and I’m trying to take Donald’s place till he comes back. If he shouldn’t come I’ll stay anyway and do the best I can. Then when Andra comes he’ll work the two places; it would be easy for him—you never saw Andra. I’m sure he’s coming back—somehow you
couldn’t think of Andra not coming back. He just wasn’t afraid of anything and the things that set other people cowering before them, just naturally made way for him. He always drove the logs over the gorge where every other man in the place thought it was playing with death to go—and when something came loose at a barn-raising and the whole framework seemed ready to come crashing down on the men, he crawled out on a beam with the timbers swaying under him and drove the joint together. Of course they say a man has no chance at all over there; that it’s just human life put up against so much machinery; still I can’t think Andra won’t come back—that just couldn’t be,” she cried, a terrified protest in her blue eyes. “But he might come back not able to do things like when he went away,” she added quietly, “and that’s why I want to keep the farm going as well as I can. We could still make a living here; so we could be married even if he couldn’t work.