A RIFT IN THE LUTE
THEY were married. And in swift procession the months followed the weeks.
At the Circle Diamond, Ruth queened it with a naïve childishness from which her youth had not yet escaped. Eagerly she played at housekeeping for a fortnight under the amused eyes of Mrs. Stovall, who had been employed by McCoy to do the cooking, her term as postmistress having expired. The next game that drew her was the remodelling of the house. Carpenters and decorators from Wagon Wheel came up, filled the place with litter and confusion, and under the urge of the young mistress transformed the interior of the unsightly dwelling into a delightful home. An absorbing period of needlework followed. New and pretty dresses took shape and were exhibited to Rowan, who did not have to feign admiration. For if she had been Paris gowned the slender grace of the girl could not have been enhanced in his eyes. She had a native instinct for style, a feeling for the harmonies and values of dress. Whatever she wore became an expression of her personality.
Ruth’s husband confessed to himself with a sinking heart that she did not really belong on a frontier ranch. The girl wife brought to her new home all the fastidiousness that had charmed him. Her sewing room was cheerful with Indian paint brushes and columbines, her little bedroom a study in delicate blues. He was glad of that. He did not want the dust of the commonplace to dull her vividness.
It pleased him that she accepted lightly all responsibility except that of having a good time. She had shipped her own piano to Wyoming, and she played a good deal. Sometimes she read a little, more often rode or hunted. Occasionally Rowan joined her on these excursions, but usually she went alone. For business more and more absorbed his time. The war between the sheep and cattle interests was becoming acute. Ranchmen, watching the range jealously, saw themselves being pushed closer to bankruptcy by Tait and his associates. Already there had been sheep raids. Cattle had been found dead at the water holes. Bullets had sung back and forth.
But though Rowan could spend little time with the girl he had married, a deep tenderness permeated his thought of her. It was still a miracle to him that she had come to the Circle Diamond as his wife.
When he rode the range he carried with him mental etchings of her little graces—the swiftness of the ready smile, the turn of the small, beautifully poised head, the virginal shyness that always captivated him. He missed sheer joy because he was profoundly unsure of holding her. Ruth, he felt, was in love with life, and he was merely a detail of the Great Adventure. Some day she might grow weary, take wings, and fly. Meanwhile a certain diffidence born of reticence sealed his lips. He found it impossible to express the emotion he knew so poignantly. It was of the hill code that a man must not show his naked soul.
On an August morning Ruth, dawdling over breakfast alone, glimpsed through the dining-room window a rider galloping toward the ranch. Since Rowan had been in the saddle and away long before she was awake, the young woman answered the hail from without by going to the door.
The horseman had dismounted, flung the bridle rein to the ground, and was coming up the porch steps when Ruth appeared. He lifted the broad hat from his curly head and bowed.
“Rowan at home?” he asked.
“No, he isn’t.”
Swift anger blazed in the eyes of the girl. She had seen this slender, black-haired stranger twice before, once in the orchard of the Dude Ranch, again astride a volcanic bronco in the arena at Bad Ax.
Some wise instinct warned him not to smile. He spoke gravely. “Sorry. I’ve got news for him. It’s important. Where is he?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did he say when he would be back?”
“No.” Ruth cut short the conversation curtly. “I’ll send one of the boys to talk with you.”
She turned and walked into the house, leaving him on the porch. Out of the tail of her eye she caught sight of her husband riding into the yard with his foreman. From the dining-room window she presently watched McCoy canter away in the company of Silcott.
Ruth was annoyed, even though she recognized that her vexation at Rowan was not quite fair. It was true that he had lately fallen into a habit of disappearing for a day at a time without explanation of his absence. He was worried about something, and he had not made a confidante of her. This was bad enough, but what she resented most was the fact that he was on the best of terms with the handsome young scamp who had kissed her so blithely in the orchard. Of course she had no right to blame her husband for this, since she had never told him of the episode. Yet she did. For her mind moved by impulse and not by logic.
She wandered into the kitchen and whipped together a salad for luncheon. She knitted two rows on a sweater at which she was working, and flung it aside to plunge into one of Chopin’s waltzes at the piano. But Ruth was not in the mood for music. Restlessly she turned to a magazine, fingered the pages aimlessly, read at a story for a paragraph or two, then with a sudden decision tossed the periodical on the table and walked out of the house to the garage. Yet a minute, and she was spinning down the road toward Bovier’s Camp.
It was such a day in late summer as comes only to the Rockies. From a blue sky, flecked with a few mackerel clouds, poured a bath of sunshine. Her lungs drank in an air like wine, pure and strong. The sunny slopes of the high peaks pushed up into the rare, untempered light of Wyoming. The scent of the pines was in her nostrils. Once, when she stopped to look at a doubtful tire, the murmurous voices of the desert whispered in her ears. In spite of herself Ruth’s heart answered the call of the distant, shining mountain to rejoice and be glad.
The car topped the rim of the saucer-shaped valley and swept down toward the little village. What Ruth saw quickened her blood. Beyond the post office a great huddle of sheep was being driven forward. At the head of them rode a man with a rifle in one hand lying across the horn of the saddle. On the porch of the store sat Larry Silcott and her husband watching the man steadily. Neither of them carried any arms exposed to view.
The young wife drove the car down the basin and stopped near the store, leaving the engine still running. None of the men even glanced her way. Their eyes were focused on each other with a tenseness that made her want to scream. She waited, breathless, uncertain what to expect. The pulse in her throat beat fast with excitement. That a collision of some sort impended she did not need to be told.
The man with the rifle spoke thickly in a heavy, raucous voice: “I’ve been looking for you, Rowan McCoy. First off, I’ll tell you something. I’m here with my sheep like I promised, on the way to Circle Diamond. I’m going right past the door of the ranch to Thunder Mountain. If any man tries to stop me, I’ll fix his clock. Get that?”
Rowan’s eyes were like chilled steel, his body absolutely motionless. “Better turn back while you can, Tait,” he advised quietly.
“I’ll see you in hell first. I’m going through. But there’s another thing I’ve got to settle with you, Rowan McCoy. That’s about my wife. Stand up and fight, you white-livered coyote!” A sudden passionate venom leaped into the voice of the sheepman. He cursed his enemy savagely and flung at him a string of vile names.
Ruth, terror-stricken, believed the man was working himself up to do murder. She wanted to cry out, to rush forward and beg him to stop. But her throat was parched and her limbs weighted with heavy chains.
“Your wife left you because you are a bully and a drunkard. I had nothing to do with her going,” retorted McCoy.
“You’re a liar—a rotten liar! You got her to run away with you. You took her in your car to Wagon Wheel. You gave her money to buy a ticket. You were seen on the train with her. I swore I’d kill you on sight, and I’m going to do it. Get out of the way, Silcott!”
The energy flowed back into Ruth’s limbs. She threw in the clutch and drove forward furiously. There was the sound of a shot, then of another. Next moment she was pushing home the brake and shutting off the gas. The car slammed to a halt, its wheels hard against the porch. She had driven directly between the sheepman and his intended victim.
Out of the haze that for a moment enveloped Ruth’s senses boomed a savage, excited voice:
“Turn me loose, Mac! Lemme go! I’ll finish the damned sheepman while I’m on the job.”
The scene opened before her eyes like a moving-picture film. On the porch her husband was struggling with a man for the possession of a gun, while young Silcott was sagging against a corner pillar, one hand clutched to his bleeding shoulder. Thirty yards away Tait lay on the ground, face down, beside his horse. From the corral, from the store, from the adjoining doctor’s office men poured upon the scene.
The place was suddenly alive with gesticulating people.
Rowan tore the rifle from the man with whom he was wrestling. “Don’t be a fool, Falkner. You’ve done enough already. I shouldn’t wonder if Tait had got his.”
“He had it coming to him, if ever a man had. If I’d been two seconds later you’d have been a goner, Mac. I just beat him to it. Good riddance if he croaks, I say.”
McCoy caught sight of Ruth. He moved toward her, his eyes alive with surprise and dismay.
“You—here!”
“He didn’t hit you!” She strangled a sob.
“No. Falkner fired from the store window. It must have shaken his aim. He hit Larry.”
Rowan turned swiftly to his friend, who grinned feebly up at him.
“ ’S all right, Mac. I’ll ride in a heap of round-ups yet. He punctured my shoulder.”
“Good! Let’s have a look at it.”
A fat little man with a doctor’s case puffed up to the porch as McCoy was cutting away the shirt of the wounded man from the shoulder.
“Here! Here! Wha’s the matter? Lemme see. Get water—bandages,” he exploded in staccato snorts like the engine of a motor cycle.
Ruth flew into the house to obey orders. When she returned with a basin of water and towels the doctor had gone.
“Doc is over looking at Tait,” explained her husband. “Says Larry has only a flesh wound. We’ll take him home with us in the car. You don’t mind?”
“Of course we’ll look after him till he’s well,” Ruth agreed.
“I wouldn’t think of troubling you, Mrs. McCoy,” objected Silcott. “All I need is——”
“Rest and good food and proper care. You’ll get it at the Circle Diamond,” the girl interrupted decisively. “We needn’t discuss that. You’re going with us.”
She had her way, as she usually had. After Doctor Irwin had dressed the shoulder the young ranchman got into the back seat of the car beside Ruth. McCoy asked a question point-blank of the fussy little physician:
“What about Tait? Will he live?”
“Ought to. If no complications. Just missed lower intestines—near thing. Lot of damn fools—all of you!” he snorted.
“Sure thing,” grinned Silcott. “Come and see me to-night, Doc.”
“H’mp!”
“I’ll be looking for you, Doctor Irwin,” Ruth called back from the moving car.
The doctor growled out what might be taken for a promise if one were an optimist.
From the rim of the valley McCoy looked down and spoke grimly: “I notice that Tait’s herders have changed their minds. They’re driving the sheep back along the road they came.”
“Before we’re through with them they’ll learn where to head in,” boasted Larry querulously, for his wound was aching a good deal. “Next time they cross the dead line there’ll be a grave dug for someone.”
“I wouldn’t say that, Larry,” objected Rowan gently. “We’d better cut out threats. They lead to trouble. We don’t want to put ourselves in the wrong unnecessarily. Take Falkner now. I was just in time to keep him from finishing Tait.”
“Oh, Falkner! He’s crazy to be a killer. But at that I don’t blame him this time,” commented the younger man.
Silcott went to bed in the guest chamber between clean sheets, and sank back with a sigh of content into the pillow. The atmosphere of home indefinably filled the room. The cool tints of the wall paper, the pictures, the feminine touches visible here and there, all were contributing factors, but the light-footed girl, so quiet and yet so very much alive in every vivid gesture, every quick glance, was the centre of the picture.
He knew that she had something on her mind, that she was troubled and distrait. He thought he could guess the reason, and felt it incumbent upon him to set himself right with her. When, toward evening, she brought him a dainty tray of food he could keep away from the subject no longer.
“I was a sweep,” he confessed humbly.
For an instant she did not know what he meant. Then: “Yes,” she agreed.
“I’m sorry. You’ve made me ashamed. Won’t you forgive me?” he pleaded.
Ruth had plenty of capacity for generosity. This good-looking boy was ill and helpless. He appealed strongly to the mother instinct that is alive in all good women. He was the central figure, too, of an adventure which had excited her and intrigued her interest. Moreover, she was cherishing a new and more important resentment, one which made her annoyance at him of small moment.
“Do you mean it? Are you really sorry?” she asked.
He nodded. “I think so. I know I ought to be. Anyhow, I’m sorry you’re angry at me,” he answered with a little flare of boyish audacity.
She bit her lip, then laughed in spite of herself. She held out her hand a little hesitantly, but he knew he was forgiven.
Young Silcott’s fever mounted toward evening, but when Doctor Irwin arrived he gave him a sleeping powder and before midnight the wounded man fell asleep. Ruth tiptoed about the room while she arranged on a little table beside the bed his medicines and drinks in case he awakened later. After lowering the light she stole away silently to her own bedroom.
Rowan knocked a few minutes later. He heard her move across the floor in her soft slippers. She wore a dainty crepe-de-Chine robe that lent accent to the fresh softness of her young flesh. She had just been brushing her hair, and the long, heavy, blue-black braids were thrown forward over her shoulders.
All day McCoy had been swept by waves of tenderness for this girl wife of his who had risked her life to save him by driving into the line of fire so pluckily. He had longed to open his heart to her, and he had not dared. Now there was a new note about her that puzzled him, one he had never seen before. The eyes that flashed into his were fierce with defiance. Her slim figure was very erect and straight.
“What do you want?” she demanded.
He was taken aback. Never before had her manner been less than friendly to him. While she was in this mood he could not voice his surcharge of feeling for her.
“You are tired,” he suggested.
A sudden gusty passion flared in her face. “Did you come to tell me that?”
“No. To thank you.”
“What for?”
“For risking your life for me this morning. It was splendid.”
She dismissed his thanks with a contemptuous little snap of finger and thumb.
“If that’s all you have to say——”
“That’s all, except good-night, dear.”
Definitely she refused his wistfulness, definitely withdrew into herself and met his appeal icily.
“Good-night.” Her voice rejected flatly the love he offered.
Always he had been chary of embraces with her. To him she was so fine and exquisite that her kisses were a privilege not to be claimed of right. Now he merely hid his hurt with a patient smile.
“I hope you’ll sleep well.”
Her eyes flamed with scorn. She closed the door. He heard the key turn in the lock. Rowan knew that she was locking him out of her heart as well as out of the room.