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.