Love's Protegé

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.