The captain shook the big white paw, gravely put into his hand at the Little Colonel’s bidding, and then stooped to stroke the dog’s head.  As he looked into the wistful, intelligent eyes his own grew tender.

“I have a son in the service,” he said, “sent back from South Africa, covered with scars.  I know what that Red Cross meant to him for a good many long weeks.  Go where you like, old fellow!  The ship is yours, so long as you make no trouble.”

“Oh, thank you!” cried the Little Colonel, looking up at the big British captain with a beaming face.  “I’d rathah be tied up myself than to have Hero kept down there in the hold.  I’m suah he’ll not bothah anybody.”

Nor did he.  No one from stoker to deck steward could make the slightest complaint against him, so dignified and well behaved was he.  Lloyd was proud of him and his devotion.  Wherever she went he followed her, lying at her feet when she sat in her steamer-chair, walking close beside her when she and Betty promenaded the deck.

Everybody stopped to speak to him, and to question Lloyd and Betty about him, so that it was not many days before the little girls and the great St. Bernard had made friends of all the passengers who were able to be on deck.

The hours are long at sea, and people gladly welcome anything that provides entertainment, so Lloyd and Betty were often called aside as they walked, and invited to join some group, and tell to a knot of interested listeners all they knew of Hero and the Major, and the training of the French ambulance dogs.

In return Lloyd’s stories nearly always called forth some anecdote from her listeners about the Red Cross work in America, and to her great surprise she found five persons among them who had met Clara Barton in some great national calamity of fire, flood, or pestilence.

One was a portly man with a gruff voice, who had passed through the experiences of the forest fires that swept through Michigan, over twenty years ago.  As he told his story, he made the scenes so real that the children forgot where they were.  They could almost smell the thick, stifling smoke of the burning forest, hear the terrible crackling of the flames, feel the scorching heat in their faces, and see the frightened cattle driven into the lakes and streams by the pursuing fire.

They listened with startled eyes as he described the wall of flame, hemming in the peaceful home where his little son played around the door-step.  They held their breath while he told of their mad flight from it, when, lashing his horses into a gallop, he looked back to see it licking up everything in the world he held dear except the frightened little family huddled at his feet.  He had worked hard to build the cottage.  It was furnished with family heirlooms brought West with them from the old homestead in Vermont.  It was hard to see those great red tongues devouring it in a mouthful.

In the morning, although they had reached a place of safety, they were out in a charred, blackened wilderness, without a roof to shelter them, a chair to sit on, or a crust to eat.  “The hardest thing to bear,” he said, “was to hear my little three-year-old Bertie begging for his breakfast, and to know that there was nothing within miles of us to satisfy his hunger, and that the next day it would be the same, and the next, and the next.