Margaret Vandercook

The Red Cross Girls Margaret Vandercook

In the last volume of the Red Cross series the four American girls spent six months in war-torn Belgium caring for ill Belgian citizens. Minus one, the three other American Red Cross girls decide to continue their nursing of the wounded soldiers of the Allied armies in far-off Russia. One cold October afternoon girls were standing in the stone courtyard of a great Russian fortress near the border line of Poland. Situated upon a cone-shaped hill, the fort itself had been built like the three sides of a square, with the yard as the center. Along the fourth side ran a cement wall with a single iron gate. Evidently the three girls were engaged in Red Cross work, for they wore the familiar service uniforms. One of them had on a heavy coat and cap, but the other two must have just come out of doors for a few moments. Indeed, their first words revealed this fact."I really don't feel that you should be starting upon this expedition alone, Nona," Mildred Thornton argued. She was a tall girl, with heavy, flaxen hair and quiet, steel-gray eyes. She was gazing anxiously about her, for Russia was a new and strange world to the three American Red Cross nurses, who had arrived at their present headquarters only a few weeks before.