A RIDE
STILL at the age when she was frankly the centre of her own universe,
Ruth Trovillion had an abundant sense of romance. There was no intention
in her decided young mind of treading a road worn dusty by the feet of
the commonplace. On occasion a fine rapture filled her hours. She was
still reacting to the ecstatic shock of youth’s early-morning plunge
into the wonderful river of life.
Rowan McCoy had impressed himself upon her imagination. He had not come
into her life with jingling spurs, garnished like Larry Silcott with all
the picturesque trimmings of the frontier. Larry was too free, too
fresh, she thought. But McCoy, quiet, competent son of the hard-riding
West, depended on no adventitious aid of costume. He was as indigenous
and genuine as one of his own hill cattle. Ruth had admirers in plenty,
but they dwindled to non-heroic proportions before his brown virility,
his gentle, reticent strength.
Quietly she gathered information about him. The owner of the Circle
Diamond was a leader in the community by grace of natural fitness. Tim
Flanders, who kept the Elkhorn Lodge, summed him up for Ruth in two
sentences:
“He’s a straight-up rider, Mac is. He’ll do to take along.”
“What do you mean by that?” asked his young guest.
“You can tie to him. He’ll go through. There’s no yellow in Rowan
McCoy.”
She thought over that a good deal. Her judgment concurred. So far as it
went, the verdict of Flanders was sound. But it did not go far enough.
During the ride to the ranch she had discovered that the cattleman had a
capacity for silence. Ruth found herself fascinated by the desire to
push through to the personality behind the wall of reserve.
For some time she was given no chance. It was ten days after the rescue
before she saw him again.
She went on her way with what patience she could, enjoying the
activities of the “dude” ranch. She rode, fished, and picnicked in the
hills with the other guests. Two days were spent in climbing Big Twin
Peak. In the evenings she read to her aunt while that lady indefatigably
knitted. The surface of her mind was absorbed by the details of the life
arranged for her. McCoy was not on the horizon of her movements, but he
was very much in the map of her thoughts. She did not hear his name
mentioned. To these well-to-do people from the East spending a pleasant
vacation in Wyoming he did not exist. But it was impossible for Ruth to
get this quiet, steady-eyed man out of her mind.
Why did he not come to see her? Yet, even as she asked herself the
question, Ruth found an adequate answer. She had very little vanity.
Probably she had not interested him. There was no real reason why he
should call unless he wanted to do so.
Then one day, unexpectedly, she met him on a hill trail.
“Why haven’t you been to see me?” she asked, with the directness that
characterized her at times.
Yet she quaked at her own audacity. He might think even though he would
be too courteous to say so, that he did not care to waste the time.
He thought a moment before he committed himself to words. He had wanted
to come, but he had passed through an experience which made him very
reserved with women. He never called on any, nor did he go to dances or
merrymakings.
“I’ve been pretty busy, Miss Trovillion,” he said.
“That’s no excuse. I might have got pneumonia from wet feet or gone into
a nervous breakdown from the shock. You’ve got no right to pull a girl
out of the river and then ride away and forget she ever existed. It’s
not good form. They are not doing it this year.”
He laughed at the jaunty impudence of her tilted chin. Somehow she
reminded him of a young, singing meadow-lark experimenting with its
wings. He suspected shyness back of her audacity. Yet he was surprised
at his own answer when he heard it; at least he was surprised at the
impulse which had led him to make it.
“Oh, I haven’t forgotten you. I’ll be glad to come to see you, if I
may.”
“When?”
“Will this evening do?”
“I’ll be looking for you, Mr. McCoy.”
The cattleman told the simple truth when he said that he had not
forgotten her. The girl had been very much in his mind ever since he had
left her at the gate of the Lodge. He loved all young, clean life even
among animals, and she seemed to him the embodied youth of the world,
free and light-footed as a fawn in the misty break of day.
When McCoy reached Elkhorn Lodge after dinner Ruth introduced him to her
aunt, a thin, flat-bosomed spinster with the marks of ill health on her
face. Miss Morgan and her niece had come to the Rockies for the health
of the older woman, and were scheduled to make an indefinite stay.
Before the cattleman had talked with her five minutes he knew that Miss
Morgan viewed life from a narrow, Puritanic standpoint. He guessed that
there was little real sympathy between her and the vivid girl by her
side.
In her early years Ruth had been a lonely, repressed little soul. An
orphaned child, she had been brought up by this maiden lady, who looked
on the leggy, helter-skelter youngster with the tangled flying hair as a
burden laid upon her by the Lord. Ruth had been a lawless, wilful little
thing, naughty and painfully plain by the standard of her aunt; a
difficult little girl to train in the way she should go.
Surprisingly she had blossomed from the ugly-duckling stage into a most
attractive girl. Nobody had been more amazed at the transformation than
her aunt. The change was not merely external. The manner of Ruth had
become gentler, less wilful. As a nurse she had developed patience
toward the invalid.
“Do you mind if Mr. McCoy and I ride out to Flat Top for the sunset?”
she asked now.
“No, child. I’ll be all right. But don’t stay late,” Miss Morgan
assented a little fretfully. It was one of Ruth’s ways to become
absorbed in the interest of the moment to forgetfulness of everything
else. This was one of the penalties her friends paid for her vivid
enthusiasms.
The riders passed a poster tacked to a tree just outside the gates of
the ranch. It bore this legend:
─────────────────────────────────────
RIDE ’EM, COWBOYS!
ANNUAL ROUND-UP AT BAD AX
July 2, 3, and 4.
————
Best Bronco Busters, Ropers,
And Bulldoggers
From a Dozen States Will Compete
FOR WORLD’S CHAMPIONSHIP
————
Pony Races, Indian Dances, Balls,
and Street Carnival.
————
Also Fancy Roping and Riding
————
DON’T MISS THIS GREAT ROUND-UP.
IT’S A BIG LEAGUE SHOW.
─────────────────────────────────────
Ruth drew up to read it. She turned to her companion. “You’ll ride, I
suppose? Mr. Flanders says you’re a famous bronco buster.”
“I don’t reckon I will,” he answered. “Some of the boys entered me, but
I’ve decided not to go in this year.”
“Why not?”
“Gettin’ too old to be jolted around so rough,” he replied, smiling.
“The younger lads can take their turn.”
“Yes, you look as though you had one foot in the grave,” she derided,
with a swift glance at the muscular shoulders above the long, lean body.
“Of course you’ll ride. You’ve got to. Aren’t you champion of the
world?”
“That’s just a way of talkin’,” he explained. “They have one of these
shows each year at Cheyenne. Other places have ’em too. The winners
can’t all be champions of the world.”
“But I want to see you ride,” she told him, as though he could not
without discourtesy refuse so small a favour.
He dismissed this with a smile.
From Flat Top they watched the sun go down behind a sea of rounded
hills. The flame of it was in her blood, the glow of it on her face. She
was in love with Wyoming these days, with the cool and crystalline air
of its mornings, with the scarfs of heat waving across the desert at
noon, with the porphyry mountain peaks edged with fire at even. There
was this much of the poet in Ruth Trovillion, that she could go out at
dewy dawn and find a miracle in the sunrise.
Impulsively she turned to her companion a face luminous with joy.
“Don’t you just love it all?”
He nodded. The picture struck a spark from his imagination. By some
trick of light and shade she seemed the heart of the sunset, a golden,
glowing creature of soft, warm flesh through which an ardent soul
quivered and palpitated with vague yearnings and inarticulate desires.
Into the perfect peace of a harmonious world jarred a raucous shout.
From a hill pocket back of Flat Top came a cloud of dust. In the falling
light a dim, gray mass poured out upon the mesa. It moved with a soft
rustle of small, padded feet, of wool fleeces rubbing against each
other.
A horseman cantered into view and caught sight of McCoy. With a jeering
laugh he shouted a greeting:
“Fine sheep weather these days, McCoy. How about cows?”
The eyes of the cattleman blazed. The girl noticed the swift flush under
the tan of the cheeks, the lips that closed like a steel trap. It was
plain that the man rode himself with a strong rein.
“I’m still waiting in the door of my sheep wagon for you and your
friends,” scoffed the drunken voice. “And my wagon is a whole lot nearer
the Circle Diamond than it was. One of these days I’ll drive up to your
door like I promised.”
Still McCoy said nothing, but the muscles stood out on his clamped jaws
like ropes. The sheepman rode closer, turned insolent eyes on the girl.
From his ribald, hateful mirth she shrank back with a sense of
degradation.
Tait turned his horse and galloped away. He shouted an order to a
herder. A dog passed silently in and out of the gray mass, which moved
across the mesa like an agitated wave of the sea.
The girl asked a question: “Has he crossed the dead line?”
“Yes.” Then: “What do you know about the dead line?” asked her
companion, surprised.
“Oh, I have eyes and ears.” She put herself swiftly on his side. “I
think you’re right. He’s bad—hateful. Your cattle were here first. He
brought sheep in to spite you and his other neighbours. Isn’t that
true?”
“Yes.”
McCoy wondered how much more this uncannily shrewd young person knew
about the relations between him and Tait. Did she know, for instance,
the story of how Norma Davis had jilted him to marry the sheepman?
“What will you do? Will you fight for the range?”
“Yes.” This was a subject the cattleman could not discuss. He dismissed
it promptly. “Hadn’t we better be moving toward the ranch, Miss
Trovillion?”
They rode back together in the gathering dusk.