Before noon on a recent Thursday morning, Ruby Hebert was already having a rough day.

On the way into the south Wal-Mart, her mind set on buying antifreeze and her purse full of cash for Christmas shopping for the upcoming holidays, the 75-year-old had a brush with a large town car in the parking lot.

"I was walking, and he was making a turn. … He didn't make a wide enough turn and he hit my leg," Ruby said.

And it hurt, she said, but not enough to knock her down, and definitely not enough to get all upset about, she told the man, who'd jumped out of his car and showered her with concern.

By the time the brief run-in in the parking lot was over, Ruby was the one calming him down, giving him a hug and reminding him that really, we all make mistakes.

"He looked at me and said 'Can I give you a hug?' and I said 'Sure.'"And then they hugged, two strangers in the middle of a Wal-Mart parking lot.

It wasn't the first time Ruby would hand out hugs that day. Ahead of her, things would get drastically worse before the kindness of a stranger would be the cause for thanksgiving.

She waved the man off and walked into the store to be greeted by the Wal-Mart greeter, Esther M. Keller, a friend of hers; the two had met while Ruby was shopping at the old Wal-Mart near Kirkwood Mall. They're both chatty, they admit; Ruby just likes getting to know people, and Esther, being a registered nurse, is always ready to talk.

After her chat, Ruby found her antifreeze and threw it into the cart with her purse, a neatly organized, compartment-heavy, black purse with a strap that's a little aged. Her entire life was neatly tucked inside:state identification, federal ID cards, credit cards and $2,500 cash for Christmas shopping. She'd run out of checks, Ruby said, so she withdrew cash to help with the holidays.

Ruby bought her antifreeze, pushed the cart up to cart corral next to her car, carefully put the antifreeze in and drove off to her next destination. When she parked the car, she reached over and patted the seat next to her, reaching for her purse, because that's where she always keeps it, right there where her hand can easily find it.

The seat was empty.

Panicked, she realized she'd left it in the shopping cart, outside in the parking lot. She drove as fast as she could -and as safely as possible, Ruby added -back to Wal-Mart, her mind reeling with the loss of her identification, her credit cards and the cash she was going to use to buy presents for her son and his two boys.

"Twenty-five hundred dollars is a lot of money, especially for a retiree,"she said.

She was frantic and sobbing when she got to Esther's station at the front of Wal-Mart. Pale and shaky, Esther noted. Esther was worried about her friend; Ruby has had heart trouble in the past, and Esther was concerned she was heading toward a heart attack again.

Call the police, Ruby said, in tears. I've lost my purse.

But a few minutes before, a woman in her mid-30s had handed Esther a purse, simply saying she'd found it and didn't know who it belonged to. The woman left, and Esther turned it over to her manager.

The manager brought the purse to Ruby, who immediately dug in to check the contents. The $2,500 was there.

"She was just so happy, and she just hugged me and hugged me,"Esther said. "Someone carrying that much money in a purse, I just chewed her out. I said 'Ruby, I could shake you.'"

Ruby hugged Esther, then hugged the manager who handed her the purse, and hugged Esther again.

"Tell me what else there is in the world if you can't hug people out of sheer kindness,"Ruby said.

Ruby moved to Bismarck from Steele after buying a house, but she's not from Steele. She's lived all over. She's originally from Michigan, where she worked in politics and helped campaign for John F. Kennedy, and helped put her husband, who was a state legislator, in the history books. But she'd last lived in Sacramento, Calif., working in real estate, before moving to North Dakota at the urging of a friend about eight years ago.

"It grows on you,"she said of North Dakota. "The people, the weather, just a multitude of things." She added honesty and friendliness to the list of qualities.

"Can you imagine that person, being so honest that they didn't look in my purse, they didn't do anything? She just picked it up and took it in. Anybody could've looked in there,"Ruby said, adding that she'd like to hear from the woman who returned it.

Her appreciation is indescribable, she said, and a story for the holidays, a reminder of the good stories that sometimes fall victim to the tough news making headlines every day.

"It's a good Christmas present for her,"Esther said.

(Reach reporter Crystal R. Reid at 250-8261 or at crystal.reid@bismarcktribune.com.)