Not for an instant did Ruth doubt that this was the true version of the story she had heard. It was like Rowan to do just that, quietly and without any fuss. How lacking in faith she had been ever to doubt him!
Her heart sang. She caught Mrs. Stovall in her arms and kissed the wrinkled face.
“I’ve been such a little fool,” she confided. “And I’ve been so dreadfully unhappy—and it’s all been my own fault. I got to hating Rowan, and I was awfully mean to him. Before he went away we made it all up, but I wasn’t any help to him at all during the trial. I’m so glad you told me this.” She laughed a little hysterically. “I’m the happiest girl that ever had a lover shut up in prison for life. And it’s all because of you. Oh, I’ve acted hatefully, but I’ll never do it again.”
Mrs. Stovall, comforting the young wife after the fashion of her sex, forgot that she was the cynic of the settlement, and mingled her glad tears with those of Ruth.
CHAPTER XXVII
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.