The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Blood Red Dawn, by Charles Caldwell Dobie

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Title: The Blood Red Dawn

Author: Charles Caldwell Dobie

Release Date: April 3, 2004 [eBook #11875]

Language: English

Character set encoding: US-ASCII

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THE BLOOD RED DAWN

by

CHARLES CALDWELL DOBIE

1920

To My Mother

Book I

CHAPTER I

The pastor's announcement had been swallowed up in a hum of truant
inattention, and as the heralded speaker made his appearance upon the
platform Claire Robson, leaning forward, said to her mother:

"What?... Did you catch his name?"

"A foreigner of some sort!" replied Mrs. Robson, with smug sufficiency.

For a moment the elder woman's sneer dulled the edge of Claire's
anticipations, but presently the man began to speak, and at once she
felt a sense of power back of his halting words, a sudden bursting fort
of bloom amid the frozen assembly that sat ice-bound, refusing to be
melted by the fires of an alien enthusiasm. She could not help wondering
whether he felt how hopeless it would be to force a sympathetic response
from his audience. In ordinary times the Second Presbyterian Church of
San Francisco could not possibly have had any interest in Serbia except
as a field for foreign missionaries. Now, with America in the war and
speeding up the draft, these worthy people were too much concerned with
problems nearer their own hearthstones to be swept off their feet by a
specific and almost inarticulate appeal for an obscure country, made
only a shade less remote by the accident of being accounted an ally.

Claire, straining at attention, found it hard to follow him. He talked
rapidly and with unfamiliar emphasis, and he waved his hands. Frankly,
people were bored. They had come to hear a concert and incidentally
swell the Red Cross fund, but they had not reckoned on quite this type
of harangue. Besides, an appetizing smell of coffee from the church
kitchen had begun to beguile their senses. And yet, the man talked on
and on, until quite suddenly Clair