you two burleys breaking my husband's arms, then seeing him home

  and holding a love-fest with him."

  "An' you got a right," Bud Strothers assured her. "You see, it

  happened this way--"

  "You shut up, Bud," Billy broke it. "You didn't see anything of

  it."

  Saxon looked to the San Francisco teamsters.

  "We'd come over to lend a hand, seein' as the Oakland boys was

  gettin' some the short end of it," one spoke up, "an' we've sure

  learned some scabs there's better trades than drivin' team. Well,

  me an' Jackson here was nosin' around to see what we can see,

  when your husband comes moseyin' along. When he--"

  "Hold on," Jackson interrupted. "Get it straight as you go along.

  We reckon we know the boys by sight. But your husband we ain't

  never seen around, him bein'. .."

  "As you might say, put away for a while," the first teamster took

  up the tale. "So, when we sees what we thinks is a scab dodgin'

  away from us an' takin' the shortcut through the alley--"

  "The alley back of Campbell's grocery," Billy elucidated.

  "Yep, back of the grocery," the first teamster went on; "why,

  we're sure he's one of them squarehead scabs, hired through

  Murray an' Ready, makin' a sneak to get into the stables over the

  back fences."

  "We caught one there, Billy an' me," Bud interpolated.

  "So we don't waste any time," Jackson said, addressing himself to

  Saxon. "We've done it before, an' we know how to do 'em up brown

  an' tie 'em with baby ribbon. So we catch your husband right in

  the alley."

  "I was lookin' for Bud," said Billy. "The boys told me I'd find

  him somewhere around the other end of the alley. An' the first

  thing I know, Jackson, here, asks me for a match."

  "An' right there's where I get in my fine work," resumed the

  first teamster.

  "What?" asked Saxon.

  "That." The man pointed to the wound in Billy's scalp. "I laid 'm

  out. He went down like a steer, an' got up on his knees dippy,

  a-gabblin' about somebody standin' on their foot. He didn't know

  where he was at, you see, clean groggy. An' then we done it."

  The man paused, the tale told.

  "Broke both his arms with the crowbar," Bud supplemented.

  "That's when I come to myself, when the bones broke," Billy

  corroborated. "An' there was the two of 'em givin' me the ha-ha.

  'That'll last you some time,' Jackson was sayin'. An' Anson says,

  'I'd like to see you drive horses with them arms.' An' then

  Jackson says, 'let's give 'm something for luck.' An' with that

  he fetched me a wallop on the jaw--"

  "No," corrected Anson. "That wallop was mine."

  "Well, it sent me into dreamland over again," Billy sighed. "An'

  when I come to, here was Bud an' Anson an' Jackson dousin' me at

  a water trough. An' then we dodged a reporter an' all come home

  together."

  Bud Strothers held up his fist and indicated freshly abraded

  skin.

  "The reporter-guy just insisted on samplin' it," he said. Then,

  to Billy: "That's why I cut around Ninth an' caught up with you

  down on Sixth."

  A few minutes later Doctor Hentley arrived, and drove the men

  from the rooms. They waited till he had finished, to assure

  themselves of Billy's well being, and then departed. In the

  kitchen Doctor Hentley washed his hands and gave Saxon final

  instructions. As he dried himself he sniffed the air and looked

  toward the stove where a pot was simmering.

  "Clams," he said. "Where did you buy them?"

  "I didn't buy them," replied Saxon. "I dug them myself."

  "Not in the marsh?" he asked with quickened interest.

  "Yes."

  "Throw them away. Throw them out. They're death and corruption.

  Typhoid--I've got three cases now, all traced to the clams and

  the marsh."

  When he had gone, Saxon obeyed. Still another mark against

  Oakland, she reflected--Oakland, the man-trap, that poisoned

  those it could not starve.

  "If it wouldn't drive a man to drink," Billy groaned, when Saxon

  returned to him. "Did you ever dream such luck? Look at all my

  fights in the ring, an' never a broken bone, an' here, snap,

  snap, just like that, two arms smashed."

  "Oh, it might be worse," Saxon smiled cheerfully.

  "I'd like to know how." It might have been your neck."

  "An' a good job. I tell you, Saxon, you gotta show me anything

  worse."

  "I can," she said confidently.

  "Well?"

  "Well, wouldn't it be worse if you intended staying on in Oakland

  where it might happen again?"

  "I can see myself becomin' a farmer an' plowin' with a pair of

  pipe-stems like these," he persisted.

  "Doctor Hentley says they'll be stronger at the break than ever

  before. And you know yourself that's true of clean-broken bones.

  Now you close your eyes and go to sleep. You're all done up, and

  you need to keep your brain quiet and stop thinking."

  He closed his eyes obediently. She slipped a cool hand under the

  nape of his neck and let it rest.

  "That feels good," he murmured. "You're so cool, Saxon. Your

  hand, and you, all of you. Bein' with you is like comin' out into

  the cool night after dancin' in a hot room."

  After several minutes of quiet, he began to giggle.

  "What is it?" she asked.

  "Oh, nothin'. I was just thinkin'--thinking of them mutts doin'

  me up--me, that's done up more scabs than I can remember."

  Next morning Billy awoke with his blues dissipated. From the

  kitchen Saxon heard him painfully wrestling strange vocal

  acrobatics.

  "I got a new song you never heard," he told her when she came in

  with a cup of coffee. "I only remember the chorus though. It's

  the old man talkin' to some hobo of a hired man that wants to

  marry his daughter. Mamie, that Billy Murphy used to run with

  before he got married, used to sing it. It's a kind of a sobby

  song. It used to always give Mamie the weeps. Here's the way the

  chorus goes--an' remember, it's the old man spielin'."

  And with great solemnity and excruciating Batting, Billy sang:

  "O treat my daughter kind-i-ly;

  An' say you'll do no harm,

  An' when I die I'll will to you

  My little house an' farm--

  My horse, my plow, my sheep, my cow,

  An' all them little chickens in the ga-a-rden.

  "It's them little chickens in the garden that gets me," he

  explained. "That's how I remembered it--from the chickens in the

  movin' pictures yesterday. An' some day we'll have little

  chickens in the garden, won't we, old girl?"

  "And a daughter, too," Saxon amplified.

  "An' I'll be the old geezer sayin' them same words to the hired

  man," Billy carried the fancy along. "It don't take long to raise

  a daughter if you ain't in a hurry."

  Saxon took her long-neglected ukulele from its case and strummed

  it into tune.

  "And I've a song you never heard, Billy. Tom's always singing it.

  He's crazy about taking up government land and going farming,

  only Sarah won't think
of it. He sings it something like this:

  "We'll have a little farm,

  A pig, a horse, a cow,

  And you will drive the wagon,

  And I will drive the plow."

  "Only in this case I guess it's me that'll do the plowin'," Billy

  approved. "Say, Saxon, sing 'Harvest Days.' That's a farmer's

  song, too."

  After that she feared the coffee was growing cold and compelled

  Billy to take it. In the helplessness of two broken arms, he had

  to be fed like a baby, and as she fed him they talked.

  "I'll tell you one thing," Billy said, between mouthfuls. "Once

  we get settled down in the country you'll have that horse you've

  been wishin' for all your life. An' it'll be all your own, to

  ride, drive, sell, or do anything you want with."

  And, again, he ruminated: "One thing that'll come handy in the

  country is that I know horses; that's a big start. I can always

  get a job at that--if it ain't at union wages. An' the other

  things about farmin' I can learn fast enough.--Say, d'ye remember

  that day you first told me about wantin' a horse to ride all your

  life?"

  Saxon remembered, and it was only by a severe struggle that she

  was able to keep the tears from welling into her eyes. She seemed

  bursting with happiness, and she was remembering many things--all

  the warm promise of life with Billy that had been hers in the

  days before hard times. And now the promise was renewed again.

  Since its fulfillment had not come to them, they were going away

  to fulfill it for themselves and make the moving pictures come

  true.

  Impelled by a half-feigned fear, she stole away into the kitchen

  bedroom where Bert had died, to study her face in the bureau

  mirror. No, she decided; she was little changed. She was still

  equipped for the battlefield of love. Beautiful she was not. She

  knew that. But had not Mercedes said that the great women of

  history who had won men had not been beautiful? And yet, Saxon

  insisted, as she gazed at her reflection, she was anything but

  unlovely. She studied her wide gray eyes that were so very gray,

  that were always alive with light and vivacities, where, in the

  surface and depths, always swam thoughts unuttered, thoughts that

  sank down and dissolved to give place to other thoughts. The

  brows were excellent--she realized that. Slenderly penciled, a

  little darker than her light brown hair, they just fitted her

  irregular nose that was feminine but not weak, that if anything

  was piquant and that picturesquely might be declared impudent.

  She could see that her face was slightly thin, that the red of

  her lips was not quite so red, and that she had lost some of her

  quick coloring. But all that would come back again. Her mouth was

  not of the rosebud type she saw in the magazines. She paid

  particular attention to it. A pleasant mouth it was, a mouth to

  be joyous with, a mouth for laughter and to make laughter in

  others. She deliberately experimented with it, smiled till the

  corners dented deeper. And she knew that when she smiled her

  smile was provocative of smiles. She laughed with her eyes

  alone--a trick of hers. She threw back her head and laughed with

  eyes and mouth together, between her spread lips showing the even

  rows of strong white teeth.

  And she remembered Billy's praise of her teeth, the night at

  Germanic Hall after he had told Charley Long he was standing on

  his foot. "Not big, and not little dinky baby's teeth either,"

  Billy had said, ". . . just right, and they fit you." Also, he had

  said that to look at them made him hungry, and that they were

  good enough to eat.

  She recollected all the compliments he had ever paid her. Beyond

  all treasures, these were treasures to her--the love phrases,

  praises, and admirations. He had said her skin was cool--soft as

  velvet, too, and smooth as silk. She rolled up her sleeve to the

  shoulder, brushed her cheek with the white skin for a test, with

  deep scrutiny examined the fineness of its texture. And he had

  told her that she was sweet; that he hadn't known what it meant

  when they said a girl was sweet, not until he had known her. And

  he had told her that her voice was cool, that it gave him the

  feeling her hand did when it rested on his forehead. Her voice

  went all through him, he had said, cool and fine, like a wind of

  coolness. And he had likened it to the first of the sea breeze

  setting in the afternoon after a scorching hot morning. And,

  also, when she talked low, that it was round and sweet, like the

  'cello in the Macdonough Theater orchestra.

  He had called her his Tonic Kid. He had called her a

  thoroughbred, clean-cut and spirited, all fine nerves and

  delicate and sensitive. He had liked the way she carried her

  clothes. She carried them like a dream, had been his way of

  putting it. They were part of her, just as much as the cool of

  her voice and skin and the scent of her hair.

  And her figure! She got upon a chair and tilted the mirror so

  that she could see herself from hips to feet. She drew her skirt

  back and up. The slender ankle was just as slender. The calf had

  lost none of its delicately mature swell. She studied her hips,

  her waist, her bosom, her neck, the poise of her head, and sighed

  contentedly. Billy must be right, and he had said that she was

  built like a French woman, and that in the matter of lines and

  form she could give Annette Kellerman cards and spades.

  He had said so many things, now that she recalled them all at one

  time. Her lips! The Sunday he proposed he had said: "I like to

  watch your lips talking. It's funny, but every move they make

  looks like a tickly kiss." And afterward, that same day: "You

  looked good to me from the first moment I spotted you." He had

  praised her housekeeping. He had said he fed better, lived more

  comfortably, held up his end with the fellows, and saved money.

  And she remembered that day when he had crushed her in his arms

  and declared she was the greatest little bit of a woman that had

  ever come down the pike.

  She ran her eyes over all herself in the mirror again, gathered

  herself together into a whole, compact and good to look

  upon--delicious, she knew. Yes, she would do. Magnificent as

  Billy was in his man way, in her own way she was a match for him.

  Yes, she had done well by Billy. She deserved much--all he could

  give her, the best he could give her. But she made no blunder of

  egotism. Frankly valuing herself, she as frankly valued him. When

  he was himself, his real self, not harassed by trouble, not

  pinched by the trap, not maddened by drink, her man-boy and

  lover, he was well worth all she gave him or could give him.

  Saxon gave herself a farewell look. No. She was not dead, any

  more than was Billy's love dead, than was her love dead. All that

  was needed was the proper soil, and their love would grow and

  blossom. And they were turning their backs upon Oakland to go and

  seek that proper soil.

  "Oh, Billy!
" she called through the partition, still standing on

  the chair, one hand tipping the mirror forward and back, so that

  she was able to run her eyes from the reflection of her ankles

  and calves to her face, warm with color and roguishly alive.

  "Yes?" she heard him answer.

  "I'm loving myself," she called back.

  "What's the game?" came his puzzled query. "What are you so stuck

  on yourself for!"

  "Because you love me," she answered. "I love every bit of me,

  Billy, because . . . because . . . well, because you love every bit

  of me."

  CHAPTER XIX

  Between feeding and caring for Billy, doing the housework, making

  plans, and selling her store of pretty needlework, the days flew

  happily for Saxon. Billy's consent to sell her pretties had been

  hard to get, but at last she succeeded in coaxing it out of him.

  "It's only the ones I haven't used," she urged; "and I can always

  make more when we get settled somewhere."

  What she did not sell, along with the household linen and hers

  and Billy's spare clothing, she arranged to store with Tom.

  "Go ahead," Billy said. "This is your picnic. What you say goes.

  You're Robinson Crusoe an' I'm your man Friday. Make up your mind

  yet which way you're goin' to travel?"

  Saxon shook her head.

  "Or how?"

  She held up one foot and then the other, encased in stout walking

  shoes which she had begun that morning to break in about the

  house. Shank's mare, eh?"

  "It's the way our people came into the West," she said proudly.

  "It'll be regular trampin', though," he argued. "An' I never

  heard of a woman tramp."

  "Then here's one. Why, Billy, there's no shame in tramping. My

  mother tramped most of the way across the Plains. And 'most

  everybody else's mother tramped across in those days. I don't

  care what people will think. I guess our race has been on the

  tramp since the beginning of creation, just like we'll be,

  looking for a piece of land that looked good to settle down on."

  After a few days, when his scalp was sufficiently healed and the

  bone-knitting was nicely in process, Billy was able to be up and

  about. He was still quite helpless, however, with both his arms

  in splints.

  Doctor Hentley not only agreed, but himself suggested, that his

  bill should wait against better times for settlement. Of

  government land, in response to Saxon's eager questioning, he

  knew nothing, except that he had a hazy idea that the days of

  government land were over.

  Tom, on the contrary, was confident that there was plenty of

  government hand. He talked of Honey Lake, of Shasta County, and

  of Humboldt.

  "But you can't tackle it at this time of year, with winter comin'

  on," he advised Saxon. "The thing for you to do is head south for

  warmer weather--say along the coast. It don't snow down there. I

  tell you what you do. Go down by San Jose and Salinas an' come

  out on the coast at Monterey. South of that you'll find

  government land mixed up with forest reserves and Mexican

  rancheros. It's pretty wild, without any roads to speak of. All

  they do is handle cattle. But there's some fine redwood canyons,

  with good patches of farming ground that run right down to the

  ocean. I was talkin' last year with a fellow that's been all

  through there. An' I'd a-gone, like you an' Billy, only Sarah

  wouldn't hear of it. There's gold down there, too. Quite a bunch

  is in there prospectin', an' two or three good mines have opened.

  But that's farther along and in a ways from the coast. You might

  take a look."

  Saxon shook her head. "We're not looking for gold but for

  chickens and a place to grow vegetables. Our folks had all the

  chance for gold in the early days, and what have they got to show

  for it?"

  "I guess you're right," Tom conceded. "They always played too big