"It would be worse if she did not," said Gavin. "Think of Belgium."
"But what if they sent a Canadian contingent. I wouldn't like anybody I know to go to war."
Gavin made no reply. Christina wished he would say he would like to go. They stood for a little listening to the drum. And the girl had no slightest idea that to the young man the sound was as a bugle call. It was Gavin's reveille, and it summoned him across the hills to come away. But he knew he could not obey, and he stood silent saying no word of the tumult it raised in his heart.
The next day the news that the drum had sent over the hills came to Orchard Glen. England was in the war and she would in all probability call for a Canadian contingent. Indeed Algonquin had not waited to know, but was going to offer one herself whether the rest of Canada was loyal or not. And on the very day that Britain entered the Great War, this little obscure town, set far away north in a ring of forest and lake, was calling her sons to go over seas and help the Mother Land. And it was the sound of her drums that had penetrated to the hills of Orchard Glen and had set Gavin Grant's heart throbbing in time to its beat.
Mrs. Johnnie Dunn had gone into town that morning with her milk as usual, and on her return she went out to the hay field to see if her two underlings had been attending to business in her absence. Marthy and Trooper Tom were good friends and they were not working so hard that they were unable to have a little friendly chat. The Woman bore down upon them.
"Well, if ever there was a time when there should be no hangin' round an' palaverin' that time is jist right now," she declared. "What d'ye think's the latest?"
The two men looked at her, Marthy undisturbed, Trooper alert and eager.
"England's into the war, that's what! Yes, sir, and Sam Holmes didn't keep her out of it neither. And they were enlistin' fellows in Algonquin last night, an' they say that Burke Wright—For the love o' goodness, has the boy gone clean off his head?"
"Sufferin' Moses!" cried Marthy, standing with his fork suspended.
For Trooper had turned his face to the heavens and uttered the ear-splitting war whoop that he had learned on the prairies. He threw his fork up into the air so that it turned a complete somersault, and came down and stuck neatly in the coil of hay, gave another whoop, and was off to the barn in wild leaps.