“But folks didn’t want to mad Joe Tait,” went on the housekeeper. “He was always raising a rookus with someone. Folks knew he’d beat the head off’n any man that helped Norma get away from him. So they all had excuses. When I was at my wit’s end Mac came along in his car, headed for Wagon Wheel. I asked him to take Norma along with him. Well, you know Mac. He said, ‘Where is she?’ And I told him. And he took her.” Ruth nodded urgently, impatiently. She could not hear the rest too soon. “Mac stands up on his own hind legs. He didn’t need to ask Joe Tait’s permission to help a woman when she was in trouble,” explained Mrs. Stovall. “So he took Norma down and fixed it with Moody so’s he lent her the money for her ticket. Mac had ’phoned down to the depot agent and got the last vacant berth to Cheyenne. He gave it up to Norma and went into the day coach. That’s exactly what he did. There’s been a lot of stuff told by them that ought to ’a’ known Mac and Norma better, and o’ course Tait spread a heap of scandal, but Bart Mason, the Pullman conductor, told me this his own self. Mac never even sat down beside Norma. He talked with her a minute, and then walked right through to the chair car.” 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.