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.