by a bullet in the fight with the Indians at Little Meadow.
Almost, it seemed, she could visualize the women who had kept
their pretties and their family homespun in its drawers--the
women of those wandering generations who were grandmothers and
greater great grandmothers of her own mother. Well, she sighed,
it was a good stock to be born of, a hard-working, hard-fighting
stock. She fell to wondering what her life would have been like
had she been born a Chinese woman, or an Italian woman like those
she saw, head-shawled or bareheaded, squat, ungainly and swarthy,
who carried great loads of driftwood on their heads up from the
beach. Then she laughed at her foolishness, remembered Billy and
the four-roomed cottage on Pine Street, and went to bed with her
mind filled for the hundredth time with the details of the
furniture.



CHAPTER XIII

"Our cattle were all played out," Saxon was saying, "and winter
was so near that we couldn't dare try to cross the Great American
Desert, so our train stopped in Salt Lake City that winter. The
Mormons hadn't got bad yet, and they were good to us."

"You talk as though you were there," Bert commented.

"My mother was," Saxon answered proudly. "She was nine years old
that winter."

They were seated around the table in the kitchen of the little