plains she drew forth another of her several precious heirloom--a
scrap-book of her mother's in which was pasted much of the
fugitive newspaper verse of pioneer California days. Also, there
were copies of paintings and old wood engravings from the
magazines of a generation and more before.

Saxon ran the pages with familiar fingers and stopped at the
picture she was seeking. Between bold headlands of rock and under
a gray cloud-blown sky, a dozen boats, long and lean and dark,
beaked like monstrous birds, were landing on a foam-whitened
beach of sand. The men in the boats, half naked, huge-muscled and
fair-haired, wore winged helmets. In their hands were swords and
spears, and they were leaping, waist-deep, into the sea-wash and
wading ashore. Opposed to them, contesting the landing, were
skin-clad savages, unlike Indians, however, who clustered on the
beach or waded into the water to their knees. The first blows
were being struck, and here and there the bodies of the dead and
wounded rolled in the surf. One fair-haired invader lay across
the gunwale of a boat, the manner of his death told by the arrow
that transfixed his breast. In the air, leaping past him into the
water, sword in hand, was Billy. There was no mistaking it. The
striking blondness, the face, the eyes, the mouth were the same.
The very expression on the face was what had been on Billy's the
day of the picnic when he faced the three wild Irishmen.

Somewhere out of the ruck of those warring races had emerged
Billy's ancestors, and hers, was her afterthought, as she closed
the book and put it back in the drawer. And some of those
ancestors had made this ancient and battered chest of drawers
which had crossed the salt ocean and the plains and been pierced