Page:Ruth of the U.S.A. (IA ruthofusa00balm).pdf/374

 swiftness with which the draft had cleared out Class I in America, to be certain that the Sam Hilton for whom she had worked in January must now be somewhere in the American army, and the particular Sam Hilton who was mentioned was a corporal in an Illinois regiment which had been most heavily engaged in the desperate fighting in the forest of the Argonne. He was awarded—Ruth read—the military medal for extraordinary bravery under fire and for display of daring and initiative which enabled him to keep together a small command after the officers were killed and finally to outwit and capture a superior German force.

Somehow it sounded like Sam Hilton to Ruth. "He got in the army and got interested; that's all," she said to herself as she re-read the details. "He wouldn't let anyone bluff him; and—yes, that sounds just like Sam Hilton after he got interested."

This was late in the fall; the Argonne then was cleared; and by a shift of the divisions who were pressing constantly after the retreating Germans, Ruth found herself in the last week of October attached to the American units fighting their way to Sedan. Infantrymen of the Illinois regiment, which possessed the decorated Sam Hilton, came into the canteen and Ruth asked about him. Everyone seemed to know him. Yes, he came from Chicago, and had been in the real estate business; he was in a battalion which recently had been heavily engaged again, but now was in reserve and resting nearby.

Ruth visited, upon the next afternoon, the little, just recaptured French village about which the battalion was billeted; and right on the main street she met—medal and