THE BLIZZARD
AGAIN spring bloomed into summer and summer yellowed into autumn. A
mellow, golden glow lay over the valleys, and in the foothills purple
asters and pink thistles lent patches of colour to a brown land.
During the daytime Ruth was busy with business details of the round-up,
of the fall beef shipment, of planting and of harvesting. The lettuce
crop had been very successful and Jennings had long ago made the _amende
honorable_ for his doubts. She had experimented with pinto beans, and
these were no sooner cut and stacked than the men were hard at it
putting in winter wheat. As soon as dusk fell she devoted herself to the
baby until he went to sleep for the night. In the evening she took up
the accounts of the ranch, wrote to Rowan, held a conference with
Jennings, or did a little desultory reading. The housekeeping she left
almost entirely in the competent hands of Mrs. Stovall.
In addition to the business of the Circle Diamond and superintending the
care of a year-old baby, Ruth had other claims upon her time that she
could not ignore. One of these was her promise to Sam Yerby to look
after Missie and the boy. It was her custom to have them down for a day
every other month and to visit the Yerby place between times.
On a day in mid-November, with Rowan, junior, beside her, Ruth set out
in the car for the little mountain ranch. It was a cool crisp morning.
The sting of frost was in the air, and the indigo mountains were ribbed
with white in the snow-filled gulches. To the nostrils came the tang of
sage and later of pine.
After she had driven from the foothills into the cañon, Ruth stopped to
wrap an extra blanket around the baby, for the sun was painting only the
upper walls as yet, and down by the creek there was an inch-thick ice at
the edges. The early fall snows were melting on the sunny slopes above,
and Hill Creek was pouring down in a flood. The road crossed the creek
twice, but after she was on it Ruth discovered that the second bridge
was very shaky. The car got over safely, but she decided to take the
high-line road home, even though it was a few miles longer.
Robert E. Lee Yerby came running down to the gate to meet them.
“Oh, Auntie Rufe!” he shouted. “Mumma’s peelin’ a chicken for dinner.”
Ruth caught the youngster up and hugged him. He was an attractive little
chap, with the bluest of eyes and the most ingenuous of smiles.
“I like you, Auntie Rufe. You always smell like pink woses,” he confided
with the frankness of extreme youth.
His r’s were all w’s, but the young woman understood him. She gave him
another hug in payment for the compliment.
“I’ve brought budda to play with you, Bobbie.” “Budda” was the nearest
Robert could come to the word brother at the time Rowan was born, and
the word had stuck with him, as is the way with children. “Now let me
go. I must get out and shut the gate.”
“No, it don’t hurt if it’s open. Mumma said so, tos everyfing’s in the
pasture.”
As she went into the house with Missie, stripping the driving gauntlets
from her hands, Ruth noticed that clouds were banking in the sky over
the summit of the range. It looked like snow.
The days she spent with Ruth were red-letter ones for Mrs. Yerby. Missie
was a simple mountain girl, born and bred in the Wyoming hills. What
little schooling she had had was of the country-district kind. It did
not go far, and was rather sketchy even to the point she had gone. But
this radiant, vital girl from the cities, so fine and beautiful, and yet
so generous of her friendship, so competent and strong and self-reliant,
but so essentially feminine—Missie accepted what she offered with a
devotion that came near worship. She did not understand how anybody
could help loving Ruth McCoy. To be elected one of her friends was a
rare privilege. Perhaps this unquestioning approval of all she was and
did, together with Mrs. Yerby’s need of her, did more to win Ruth than
any effort the other woman could have made. She was plentifully endowed
with human failings, and flattery of this sort was no doubt incense to
her self-esteem.
The women chatted and worked while the youngsters played on the floor.
Just before dinner a cow-puncher from the Triangle Dot rode up and
trailed into the house with spurs a-jingle. He had come to tell Mrs.
Yerby about one of her yearlings he had rescued from a swamp and was
keeping in the corral for a day or two. His nostrils sniffed the dinner
in the kitchen, and it was not hard to persuade him to stay and eat.
“Wha’ a’ is?” demanded Robert E. Lee Yerby, pointing to the rowel on the
high heel of the rider.
“It’s a spur, son, for to jog a bronc’s memory when it gits to
dreamin’,” explained the young man. “I reckon I’ll step out and wash up
for dinner, Mrs. Yerby.”
When he came in, his red face glowing from soap and water, it was with a
piece of news he had till that moment forgotten.
“Have you ladies heard about Hal Falkner?”
Ruth, putting a platter of fried chicken on the table, turned abruptly
to him. “What about him?”
“He escaped from the pen four days ago—beat up a guard ’most to death
and made his get-away. Four prisoners were in the jailbreak, but they’ve
got ’em all but Hal. He reached the hills somehow.”
The eyes of Ruth McCoy asked a question she dared not put into words.
“No, ma’am. None of the rest of our boys mixed up in it a-tall,” he told
her quickly.
The young woman drew a deep breath of relief. The hope was always with
her of a day near at hand when the Bald Knob raiders would be paroled,
but she knew if they joined such an undertaking as this it would be
fatal to their chances.
“Do you think Mr. Falkner will get away?” Ruth asked.
“I reckon not, ma’am. You see, he’s got the telephone against him.
Whenever he shows up at a ranch the news will go out that he was there.
But he got holt of a gun from a farmer. It’s a cinch they won’t take him
without a fight.”
Snow was already falling when the cow-puncher took his departure. He
cast a weather eye toward the hills. “Heap much snow in them clouds. If
I was you, Mrs. McCoy, I’d start my gasoline bronc on the home trail
so’s not to run any chances of getting stalled.”
Ruth thought this good advice. It took a few minutes to wrap Rowan for
the journey and to say good-bye. By the time she was on the way the air
was full of large flakes.
The storm increased steadily as she drove toward home. There was a
rising wind that brought the sleet about her in sharp gusts. So fierce
became the swirl that when she turned into the high-line drive she was
surrounded by a white, stinging wall that narrowed the scope of her
vision to a few feet.
The temperature was falling rapidly, and the wind swept the hilltops
with a roar. The soft flakes had turned to powdered ice. It beat upon
Ruth with a deadly chill that searched to the bones.
The young mother became alarmed. The boy was well wrapped up, but no
clothing was sufficient protection against a blizzard. Moreover, there
were dangerous places to pass, cuts where the path ran along the sloping
edge of the mountain with a sheer fall of a hundred feet below. It would
never do to try to take these with snow heavy on the ledge and the way
blurred so that she could not see clearly.
Ruth stopped and tried to adjust the curtains. But her fingers were like
ice, and the knobs so sleet-incrusted that she could not fasten the
buttons. It was her intention to drive back to the Yerby ranch, and she
backed the car into a drift while trying to turn. The snow was so
slippery that the wheel failed to get a grip. She tried again and again
without success, and at last killed the engine. Her attempts to crank it
were complete failures.
It was a moment for swift decision. Ruth made hers instantly. She took
the baby from the front seat, wrapped him close to her in all the
blankets she had, and started forward toward a deserted miner’s cabin
built in a draw close to the trail.
Half a mile is no distance when the sun is shining and the path is
clear. But near and far take on different meanings in a blizzard. Drifts
underfoot made the going slow. The pelting wind, heavy with the sting of
sleet, beat upon her, sifted through her clothes, and sapped her
vitality. More than once her numbed legs doubled under her like the
blades of a jackknife.
Ruth knew she was in deadly peril. She recalled stories of how men had
wandered for hours in the white whirl, and had lain down to die at last
within a stone’s throw of their own houses. A young schoolteacher from
Denver had perished three years before with one of her hands clutching
the barbwire strand that led to safety.
But the will to live was strong in the young mother. For the sake of
that precious young life in her arms she dared not give up. Indomitably
she fought against the ice-laden wind which flung sleet waves at her to
paralyse her energy, benumb her muscles, and chill the blood in her
arteries. More than once she went down, her frozen legs buckling under
her as she moved. But always she struggled to her feet again and plowed
forward.
At last she staggered down an incline to a dip in the road. This might
or might not be the draw that led to the cabin. There was no way of
telling. But she had to make a choice, and life for both her and the
baby hung upon it.
Her instinct told her she could go no farther. Ruth left the road,
plunged into the drifts, and fought her way up the gulch. It was her
last effort, and she knew it. When she went down it was all she could do
to drag herself to her feet again. But somehow she crawled forward.
Out of the whirling snow loomed a log wall within reach of her hand. She
staggered along it to the door, felt for the latch, found it, and
stumbled into the hut.