Summary
Among the granite-ribbed peaks where the sky looks close enough to bruise, a lone huntsman—Larry Armond, equal parts swagger and ennui—stumbles upon a feral sylph in homespun: Ruth, reared on psalms and pine-needles, her only tutor a cantankerous anchorite who mistakes lightning for divine punctuation. One deathbed later, the girl, love-bitten and Bible-raw, treks downslope with nothing but a recalcitrant burro and a heart tuned to the frequency of the city man’s rifle crack. Fortune, that fickle scenarist, lands her at Larry’s gabled cottage where jazz-age guests sip gin rickeys and trade barbs sharp enough to filet innocence. Ruth’s mountain cadences, her ungloomed laugh, her habit of communing with the moon like a chatty cousin—each quirk becomes a bull’s-eye for mockery; the satire ricochets, splinters Jack Keith’s brittle engagement to a Coleman heiress, and detonates drawing-room politesse into shrapnel of gossip. Ostracized, Ruth bolts for the timberline, but the plot pirouettes: a yellowing kidnapping ledger reveals her as the abducted progeny of J. W. Coleman, tycoon of ore and opinion. The same clan that sneered now proffers perfumed contrition; they fetch her back, swaddle her in silk, and toast the lost lamb turned heiress. Yet the camera lingers on Ruth’s gaze—equal parts wonder and wound—asking whether love can survive the alchemy of identity, or if the mountain wind already reclaimed what civilization merely renamed.
Synopsis
While hunting in the mountains, Larry Armond rescues Ruth, a mountain girl who lives with her guardian, a religious recluse. After her guardian dies, Ruth, who has fallen in love with Larry, goes with her donkey in search of him and by chance comes to his summer retreat in the foothills. Her manners are ridiculed by Larry's house guests and her presence causes an embarrassing situation between Larry's friend Jack Keith and Jack's fiancée's family, the Colemans. After she is taken into the home of the Colemans, Ruth leaves to go back to the mountains because they are unfriendly to her. When it is learned that Ruth is really J. W. Coleman's daughter who was kidnapped fifteen years earlier in revenge for a supposed injustice, she is brought back and lovingly accepted into the family.
