THE SYMBOL
THE long white fingers of winter reached down through the mountain
gulches to the Circle Diamond. Ruth looked out of her windows upon a
land grown chill and drear. She saw her line riders returning to the
bunk house crusted with snow and sleet. The cattle huddled in the
shelter of haystacks, and those on the range grew rough and thin and
shaggy.
The short days were too long for the mistress of the ranch. She began to
mope, and her loneliness was accented by the bitter wind and the deep
drifts that shut her from the great world outside. A dozen times she was
on the point of going to Denver for the winter, but her pride—and
something finer than pride, a loyalty that held her back from pleasures
Rowan could not share and tied her to interests which knit her life to
his—would not let her give up the task she had set herself.
Through Louise McDowell, the wife of the governor, she ordered a package
of new books sent in from Cheyenne. With an energy almost fierce she
attacked her music again, and spent hours practising at the piano. When
the winds died down she made Jennings show her how to travel on
snowshoes, and after that there was seldom a day during which she could
not be outdoors about the place for at least a little while.
Her fragility had always been more apparent than real. Back of her
slenderness was a good deal of wiry strength. As the months passed she
took on flesh, and by spring was almost plump. The open life she
cultivated did not help her pink-and-white complexion, but brought
solidity to her frame and power to her muscles.
The boy was born in early April. Norma Tait and Mrs. Stovall nursed her
back to health, and in a few weeks she was driving over the ranch in
consultation with Jennings.
She had a new venture in her mind, one of which he did not approve at
all. She intended to raise head lettuce for the market.
Her foreman did his best to dissuade her from such a radical
undertaking.
“This here is a cattle country, ma’am. Tha’s what the Lord made it for.
O’ course it’s proper to put in some wheat an’ some alfalfa where we can
irrigate from the creek. I got nothing to say against that, because with
the price of stock good an’ the quality improved we can’t hardly afford
to have ’em rough through the way they used to do. We got to feed. Tha’s
reasonable. But why lettuce? Why not cabbages or persimmons or sweet
peas, ma’am, if you come to that.”
Jennings softened his derision with a friendly smile.
“Because there is money in this head lettuce. I’ve been reading about it
and corresponding with a farmer in Colorado who raises it. He has made a
lot of money.”
“Prob’ly he ships to Denver. But Denver ain’t such a big city that it
can’t be overstocked with a commodity. It ain’t any New York.”
“But he ships to New York and all over the country. It’s like this. By
midsummer the lettuce crop of most of the country is exhausted. The
weather is too hot for it. But up in the mountains it can be raised. It
develops into a fine solid head, the crispest in the world. Mr.
Galloway, the ranchman I told you about, writes that there is no limit
to the market and that this is going to be a permanent and a stable crop
for the Rocky Mountain country. He is very enthusiastic about it.”
“Tha’s all right too. I don’t claim he ain’t right. But we’re cattlemen.
The Circle Diamond is a cattle ranch. It ain’t any Dago truck farm. Me,
I’d never make a vegetable-garden farmer, not onless my farmin’ could be
done from the saddle. We know cattle; we don’ know lettuce.”
“If there’s money in it we can learn to know it.”
“How do we know there’s money in it here? This ain’t Colorado, come to
that. Maybe it takes a particular kind of soil and temperature. Maybe
this guy Galloway just happens to be in a lucky spot.”
“Not from what I read. Anyhow, we can put out a few acres and see how it
does.”
“Why, yes, we could,” admitted Jennings. “If we knew how to fix the land
for it an’ how to look after it. But we don’t. Why, we don’t even know
what kind of seed to buy or what kind of ground to put it in. Honest,
ma’am, it looks plumb ridiculous to me.”
“Not to me,” she dissented. “What’s the use of saying that this is a
cattle country and not good for anything else when we haven’t tried
other things? People have to be progressive to make money. As for your
objection about us not knowing the kind of seed to get or the sort of
land to use or how to prepare the land, why you’re wrong in all three of
your guesses. You buy seed called New York or else the Wonderful, and
you plant it in nice rich soil prepared the way you do a garden. I
thought we’d use that twenty back of the pasture.”
“H’mp!” he grunted. “You got yore mind made up, I see.”
“Yes,” she admitted, and added diplomatically, “if you approve.”
“Whether I approve or not,” he grinned. “A lot you care about me
approvin’. You’re some bull-haided when you get started, if you ask me.”
“If you can show me that I am wrong, of course——”
He threw up his hands. “I can’t. I wouldn’t ever try to show a lady she
was wrong. All I can do is get ready to say, ‘I done told you so’ when
you waken from yore dream about makin’ two haids of lettuce grow where
there ain’t any growin’ now.”
“You think I won’t make it grow, and I’ll lose money?” she asked.
“Why, yes, ma’am. I hate to say so, but that’s sure how it looks to me.”
She gave him her vivid smile. “You’re going to live to take off your hat
and apologize humbly, Mr. Jennings,” she prophesied.
“I sure hope so.”
Ruth made her preparations to go ahead and assumed that the foreman was
as enthusiastic as she was. She did not have to assume that he was loyal
and would support her project with a whole heart when it once got under
way.
Though she had a healthy interest in making the most of the ranch,
Ruth’s real absorption was in the baby. He was a continuous joy and
delight.
Rowan, junior, was king of the Circle Diamond from his birth. He ruled
imperiously over the hearts of the three women. It was natural that Ruth
should love him from the moment that they put him in her arms and his
little heel kicked her in the side. He was the symbol of the love of
Rowan that glowed so steadfastly in her soul. So she worshipped him for
his own sake and for the sake of the man she had married. The small body
that breathed so close to her, so helpless and so soft, filled her with
everlasting wonder and delight.
His daily bath was a function. Ruth presided over it herself, but Norma,
and often Mrs. Stovall, too, made excuses to be present. His plump legs
wrinkled into such kissable creases as he lay on his back and waved them
in the air, his smiling little mouth was such an adorable Cupid’s bow
that the young mother vowed in her heart there never had been such a boy
since time began.
But she did not coddle him. His mother had read the latest books on the
care of babies, and she intended to bring him up scientifically. He
spent a large part of his time sleeping on a screened porch, and, as he
grew older, Ruth took him with her when she drove over the place on
business.
In every letter she wrote Rowan the baby held first place, but she was
careful to show him that the boy was _his_ son as well as hers, a bond
between them from the past and a promise for the future. In one letter
she wrote:
I took Boy up into the pine copse back of the house this
afternoon. We were there, you and I and he, and we had such a
lovely time.
Isn’t it strange, dear, that the things we care about become so
infinitely a part of all life that touches us? There is no
beautiful thing of sound or vision or colour—no poignancy of
thought or feeling—that does not become a sign, somehow, for
the special gladness—as though, at bottom, all beauty and
dearness rested on the same foundation. To-day the wind has
blown swift and gray and strong, so that the hills are purple
with it, and the marching pines are touched to a low, tremendous
murmur. It is magnificent, as though something too vast and
solemn for sight passed by and one could hear only the sweeping
of its wings. And the thrill of it is one and the same with the
gladness of your letter of yesterday. There is in the heart of
them both something finer and bigger than I once could have
conceived.
While I was putting Rowan, junior, to bed I showed him your
picture—the one the Denver _Times_ photographer took just after
you won the championship last year—and he reached out his
dimpled fingers for it and spluttered, “Da-da-da-da-da.” I
believe he knows you belong to him. Before I put his nightie on
I kissed his dear little pink body for you.
Do you know that we are about to entertain distinguished
visitors at the Circle Diamond? Louise McDowell and the governor
are going to stay with us a day on their way to Yellowstone
Park. I can’t help feeling that it is a good omen. Last year
when I went to Cheyenne he would not give me any hope—said he
could not possibly do anything for me. But there has been a
great change of sentiment here. Tim Flanders talked with the
governor not long since, and urged a parole for you. I feel sure
the governor would not visit me unless he was at least in doubt.
So I’m eager to try again, with Rowan, junior, to plead for me.
He’s going to make love to the governor, innocently and
shamelessly, in a hundred darling little ways he has. Oh, you
don’t know how hard I’m going to try to win the governor this
time, dear.