that was such an amazement to others, were her mother's. Just so
had her mother been an amazement to her generation--her mother,
the toy-like creature, the smallest and the youngest of the
strapping pioneer brood, who nevertheless had mothered the brood.
Always it had been her wisdom that was sought, even by the
brothers and sisters a dozen years her senior. Daisy, it was, who
had put her tiny foot down and commanded the removal from the
fever flatlands of Colusa to the healthy mountains of Ventura;
who had backed the savage old Indian-fighter of a father into a
corner and fought the entire family that Vila might marry the man
of her choice; who had flown in the face of the family and of
community morality and demanded the divorce of Laura from her
criminally weak husband; and who on the other hand, had held the
branches of the family together when only misunderstanding and
weak humanness threatened to drive them apart.

The peacemaker and the warrior! All the old tales trooped before
Saxon's eyes. They were sharp with detail, for she had visioned
them many times, though their content was of things she had never
seen. So far as details were concerned, they were her own
creation, for she had never seen an ox, a wild Indian, nor a
prairie schooner. Yet, palpitating and real, shimmering in the
sun-flashed dust of ten thousand hoofs, she saw pass, from East
to West, across a continent, the great hegira of the land-hungry
Anglo-Saxon. It was part and fiber of her. She had been nursed on
its traditions and its facts from the lips of those who had taken
part. Clearly she saw the long wagon-train, the lean, gaunt men
who walked before, the youths goading the lowing oxen that fell
and were goaded to their feet to fall again. And through it all,
a flying shuttle, weaving the golden dazzling thread of