________________________________________________
_ The horses, resting frequently and lathered by the work, had
climbed the steep grade of the old road to Moraga Valley, and on
the divide of the Contra Costa hills the way descended sharply
through the green and sunny stillness of Redwood Canyon.
"Say, ain't it swell?" Billy queried, with a wave of his hand
indicating the circled tree-groups, the trickle of unseen water,
and the summer hum of bees.
"I love it"' Saxon affirmed. "It makes me want to live in the
country, and I never have."
"Me, too, Saxon. I've never lived in the country in my life--an'
all my folks was country folks."
"No cities then. Everybody lived in the country."
"I guess you're right," he nodded. "They just had to live in the
country."
There was no brake on the light carriage, and Billy became
absorbed in managing his team down the steep, winding road. Saxon
leaned back, eyes closed, with a feeling of ineeffable rest. Time
and again he shot glances at her closed eyes.
"What's the matter?" he asked finally, in mild alarm. "You ain't
sick?"
"It's so beautiful I'm afraid to look," she answered. "It's so
brave it hurts."
"BRAVE?--now that's funnny."
"Isn't it? But it just makes me feel that way. It's brave. Now
the houses and streets and things in the city aren't brave. But
this is. I don't know why. It just is."
"By golly, I think you're right," he exclaimed. "It strikes me
that way, now you speak of it. They ain't no games or tricks
here, no cheatin' an' no lyin'. Them trees just stand up natural
an' strong an' clean like young boys their first time in the ring
before they've learned its rottenness an' how to double-cross an'
lay down to the bettin' odds an' the fightfans. Yep; it is brave.
Say, Saxon, you see things, don't you?" His pause was almost
wistful, and he looked at her and studied her with a caressing
softness that ran through her in resurgent thrills. "D'ye know,
I'd just like you to see me fight some time--a real fight, with
something doin' every moment. I'd be proud to death to do it for
you. An' I'd sure fight some with you lookin' on an'
understandin'. That'd be a fight what is, take it from me. An'
that's funny, too. I never wanted to fight before a woman in my
life. They squeal and screech an' don't understand. But you'd
understand. It's dead open an' shut you would."
A little later, swinging along the flat of the valley, through
the little clearings of the farmers and the ripe grain-stretches
golden in the sunshine, Billy turned to Saxon again.
"Say, you've ben in love with fellows, lots of times. Tell me
about it. What's it like?"
She shook her head slowly.
"I only thought I was in love--and not many times, either--"
"Many times!" he cried.
"Not really ever," she assured him, secretly exultant at his
unconscious jealousy. "I never was really in love. If I had been
I'd be married now. You see, I couldn't see anything else to it
but to marry a man if I loved him."
"But suppose he didn't love you?"
"Oh, I don't know," she smiled, half with facetiousness and half
with certainty and pride. "I think I could make him love me."
"I guess you sure could," Billy proclaimed enthusiastically.
"The trouble is," she went on, "the men that loved me I never
cared for that way.--Oh, look!"
A cottontail rabbit had scuttled across the road, and a tiny dust
cloud lingered like smoke, marking the way of his flight. At the
next turn a dozen quail exploded into the air from under the
noses of the horses. Billy and Saxon exclaimed in mutual delight.
"Gee," he muttered, "I almost wisht I'd ben born a farmer. Folks
wasn't made to live in cities."
"Not our kind, at least," she agreed. Followed a pause and a long
sigh. "It's all so beautiful. It would be a dream just to live
all your life in it. I'd like to be an Indian squaw sometimes."
Several times Billy checked himself on the verge of speech.
"About those fellows you thought you was in love with," he said
finally. "You ain't told me, yet."
"You want to know?" she asked. "They didn't amount to anything."
"Of course I want to know. Go ahead. Fire away."
"Well, first there was Al Stanley--"
"What did he do for a livin'?" Billy demanded, almost as with
authority.
"He wss a gambler."
Billy's face abruptly stiffened, and she could see his eyes
cloudy with doubt in the quick glance he flung at her.
"Oh, it was all right," she laughed. "I was only eight years old.
You see, I'm beginning at the beginning. It was after my mother
died and when I was adopted by Cady. He kept a hotel and saloon.
It was down in Los Angeles. Just a small hotel. Workingmen, just
common laborers, mostly, and some railroad men, stopped at it,
and I guess Al Stanley got his share of their wages. He was so
handsome and so quiet and soft-spoken. And he had the nicest eyes
and the softest, cleanest hands. I can see them now. He played
with me sometimes, in the afternoon, and gave me candy and little
presents. He used to sleep most of the day. I didn't know why,
then. I thought he was a fairy prince in disguise. And then he
got killed, right in the bar-room, but first he killed the man
that killed him. So that was the end of that love affair.
"Next was after the asylum, when I was thirteen and living with
my brother--I've lived with him ever since. He was a boy that
drove a bakery wagon. Almost every morning, on the way to school,
I used to pass him. He would come driving down Wood Street and
turn in on Twelfth. Maybe it was because he drove a horse that
attracted me. Anyway, I must have loved him for a couple of
months. Then he lost his job, or something, for another boy drove
the wagon. And we'd never even spoken to each other.
"Then there was a bookkeeper when I was sixteen. I seem to run to
bookkeepers. It was a bookkeeper at the laundry that Charley Long
beat up. This other one was when I was working in Hickmeyer's
Cannery. He had soft hands, too. But I quickly got all I wanted
of him. He was . . . well, anyway, he had ideas like your boss.
And I never really did love him, truly and honest, Billy. I felt
from the first that he wasn't just right. And when I was working
in the paper-box factory I thought I loved a clerk in Kahn's
Emporium--you know, on Eleventh and Washington. He was all right.
That was the trouble with him. He was too much all right. He
didn't have any life in him, any go. He wanted to marry me,
though. But somehow I couldn't see it. That shows I didn't love
him. He was narrow-chested and skinny, and his hands were always
cold and fishy. But my! he could dress--just like he came out of
a bandbox. He said he was going to drown himself, and all kinds
of things, but I broke with him just the same.
"And after that...well, there isn't any after that. I must have
got particular, I guess, but I didn't see anybody I could love.
It seemed more like a game with the men I met, or a fight. And we
never fought fair on either side. Seemed as if we always had
cards up our sleeves. We weren't honest or outspoken, but instead
it seemed as if we were trying to take advantage of each other.
Charley Long was honest, though. And so was that bank cashier.
And even they made me have the fight feeling harder than ever.
All of them always made me feel I had to take care of myself.
They wouldn't. That was sure."
She stopped and looked with interest at the clean profile of his
face as he watched and guided the homes. He looked at her
inquiringly, and her eyes laughed lazily into his as she
stretched her arms.
"That's all," she concluded. "I've told you everything, which
I've never done before to any one. And it's your turn now."
"Not much of a turn, Saxon. I've never cared for girls--that is,
not enough to want to marry 'em. I always liked men
better--fellows like Billy Murphy. Besides, I guess I was too
interested in trainin' an' fightin' to bother with women much.
Why, Saxon, honest, while I ain't ben altogether good--you
understand what I mean--just the same I ain't never talked love
to a girl in my life. They was no call to."
"The girls have loved you just the same," she teased, while in
her heart was a curious elation at his virginal confession.
He devoted himself to the horses.
"Lots of them," she urged.
Still he did not reply.
"Now, haven't they?"
"Well, it wasn't my fault," he said slowly. "If they wanted to
look sideways at me it was up to them. And it was up to me to
sidestep if I wanted to, wasn't it? You've no idea, Saxon, how a
prizefighter is run after. Why, sometimes it's seemed to me that
girls an' women ain't got an ounce of natural shame in their
make-up. Oh, I was never afraid of them, believe muh, but I
didn't hanker after 'em. A man's a fool that'd let them kind get
his goat.
"Maybe you haven't got love in you," she challenged.
"Maybe I haven't," was his discouraging reply. "Anyway, I don't
see myself lovin' a girl that runs after me. It's all right for
Charley-boys, but a man that is a man don't like bein' chased by
women."
"My mother always said that love was the greatest thing in the
world," Saxon argued. "She wrote poems about it, too. Some of
them were published in the San Jose Mercury."
"What do you think about it?"
"Oh, I don't know," she baffled, meeting his eyes with another
lazy smile. "All I know is it's pretty good to be alive a day
like this."
"On a trip like this--you bet it is," he added promptly.
At one o'clock Billy turned off the road and drove into an open
space among the trees.
"Here's where we eat," he announced. "I thought it'd be better to
have a lunch by ourselves than atop at one of these roadside
dinner counters. An' now, just to make everything safe an'
comfortable, I'm goin' to unharness the horses. We got lots of
time. You can get the lunch basket out an' spread it on the
lap-robe."
As Saxon unpacked she basket she was appalled at his
extravagance. She spread an amazing array of ham and chicken
sandwiches, crab salad, hard-boiled eggs, pickled pigs' feet,
ripe olives and dill pickles, Swiss cheese, salted almonds,
oranges and bananas, and several pint bottles of beer. It was the
quantity as well as the variety that bothered her. It had the
appearance of a reckless attempt to buy out a whole delicatessen
shop.
"You oughtn't to blow yourself that way," she reproved him as he
sat down beside her. "Why it's enough for half a dozen
bricklayers."
"It's all right, isn't it?"
"Yes," she acknowledged. "But that's the trouble. It's too much
so."
"Then it's all right," he concluded. "I always believe in havin'
plenty. Have some beer to wash the dust away before we begin?
Watch out for the glasses. I gotta return them."
Later, the meal finished, he lay on his back, smoking a
cigarette, and questioned her about her earlier history. She had
been telling him of her life in her brother's house, where she
paid four dollars and a half a week board. At fifteen she had
graduated from grammar school and gone to work in the jute mills
for four dollars a week, three of which she had paid to Sarah.
"How about that saloonkeeper?" Billy asked. "How come it he
adopted you?"
She shrugged her shoulders. "I don't know, except that all my
relatives were hard up. It seemed they just couldn't get on. They
managed to scratch a lean living for themselves, and that was
all. Cady--he was the saloonkeeper--had been a soldier in my
father's company, and he always swore by Captain Kit, which was
their nickname for him. My father had kept the surgeons from
amputating his leg in the war, and he never forgot it. He was
making money in the hotel and saloon, and I found out afterward
he helped out a lot to pay the doctors and to bury my mother
alongside of father. I was to go to Uncle Will--that was my
mother's wish; but there had been fighting up in the Ventura
Mountains where his ranch was, and men had been killed. It was
about fences and cattlemen or something, and anyway he was in
jail a long time, and when he got his freedom the lawyers had got
his ranch. He was an old man, then, and broken, and his wife took
sick, and he got a job as night watchman for forty dollars a
month. So he couldn't do anything for me, and Cady adopted me.
"Cady was a good man, if he did run a saloon. His wife was a big,
handsome-looking woman. I don't think she was all right . . . and
I've heard so since. But she was good to me. I don't care what
they say about her, or what she was. She was awful good to me.
After he died, she went altogether bad, and so I went into the
orphan asylum. It wasn't any too good there, and I had three
years of it. And then Tom had married and settled down to steady
work, and he took me out to live with him. And--well, I've been
working pretty steady ever since."
She gazed sadly away across the fields until her eyes came to
rest on a fence bright-splashed with poppies at its base. Billy,
who from his supine position had been looking up at her, studying
and pleasuring in the pointed oval of her woman's face, reached
his hand out slowly as he murmured:
"You poor little kid."
His hand closed sympathetically on her bare forearm, and as she
looked down to greet his eyes she saw in them suprise and
delight.
"Say, ain't your skin cool though," he said. "Now me, I'm always
warm. Feel my hand."
It was warmly moist, and she noted microscopic beads of sweat on
his forehead and clean-shaven upper lip.
"My, but you are sweaty."
She bent to him and with her handkerchief dabbed his lip and
forehead dry, then dried his palms.
"I breathe through my skin, I guess," he explained. "The wise
guys in the trainin' camps and gyms say it's a good sign for
health. But somehow I'm sweatin' more than usual now. Funny,
ain't it?"
She had been forced to unclasp his hand from her arm in order to
dry it, and when she finished, it returned to its old position.
"But, say, ain't your skin cool," he repeated with renewed
wonder. "Soft as velvet, too, an' smooth as silk. It feels
great."
Gently explorative, he slid his hand from wrist to elbow and came
to rest half way back. Tired and languid from the morning in the
sun, she found herself thrilling to his touch and half-dreamily
deciding that here was a man she could love, hands and all.
"Now I've taken the cool all out of that spot." He did not look
up to her, and she could see the roguish smile that curled on his
lips. "So I guess I'll try another."
He shifted his hand along her arm with soft sensuousness, and
she, looking down at his lips, remembered the long tingling they
had given hers the first time they had met.
"Go on and talk," he urged, after a delicious five minutes of
silence. "I like to watch your lips talking. It's funny, but
every move they make looks like a tickly kiss."
Greatly she wanted to stay where she was. Instead, she said:
"If I talk, you won't like what I say."
"Go on," he insisted. "You can't say anything I won't like."
"Well, there's some poppies over there by the fence I want to
pick. And then it's time for us to be going."
"I lose," he laughed. "But you made twenty-five tickle kisses
just the same. I counted 'em. I'll tell you what: you sing 'When
the Harvest Days Are Over,' and let me have your other cool arm
while you're doin' it, and then we'll go."
She sang looking down into his eyes, which ware centered, not on
hers, but on her lips. When she finished, she slipped his hands
from her arms and got up. He was about to start for the horses,
when she held her jacket out to him. Despite the independence
natural to a girl who earned her own living, she had an innate
love of the little services and finenesses; and, also, she
remembered from her childhood the talk by the pioneer women of
the courtesy and attendance of the caballeros of the
Spanish-California days.
Sunset greeted them when, after a wide circle to the east and
south, they cleared the divide of the Contra Costa hills and
began dropping down the long grade that led past Redwood Peak to
Fruitvale. Beneath them stretched the flatlands to the bay,
checkerboarded into fields and broken by the towns of Elmhurst,
San Leandro, and Haywards. The smoke of Oakland filled the
western sky with haze and murk, while beyond, across the bay,
they could see the first winking lights of San Francisco.
Darkness was on them, and Billy had become curiously silent. For
half an hour he had given no recognition of her existence save
once, when the chill evening wind caused him to tuck the robe
tightly about her and himself. Half a dozen times Saxon found
herself on the verge of the remark, "What's on your mind?" but
each time let it remain unuttered. She sat very close to him. The
warmth of their bodies intermingled, and she was aware of a great
restfulness and content.
"Say, Saxon," he began abruptly. "It's no use my holdin' it in
any longer. It's ben in my mouth all day, ever since lunch.
What's the matter with you an' me gettin' married?"
She knew, very quietly and very gladly, that he meant it.
Instinctively she wss impelled to hold off, to make him woo her,
to make herself more desirably valuable ere she yielded. Further,
her woman's sensitiveness and pride were offended. She had never
dreamed of so forthright and bald a proposal from the man to whom
she would give herself. The simplicity and directness of Billy's
proposal constituted almost a hurt. On the other hand she wanted
him so much--how much she had not realized until now, when he had
so unexpectedly made himself accessible.
"Well you gotta say something, Saxon. Hand it to me, good or bad;
but anyway hand it to me. An' just take into consideration that I
love you. Why, I love you like the very devil, Saxon. I must,
because I'm askin' you to marry me, an' I never asked any girl
that before."
Another silence fell, and Saxon found herself dwelling on the
warmth, tingling now, under the lap-robe. When she realized
whither her thoughts led, she blushed guiltily in the darkness.
"How old are you, Billy?" she questioned, with a suddenness and
irrelevance as disconcerting as his first words had been.
"Twenty-two," he answered.
"I am twenty-four."
"As if I didn't know. When you left the orphan asylum and how old
you were, how long you worked in the jute mills, the cannery, the
paper-box factory, the laundry--maybe you think I can't do
addition. I knew how old you was, even to your birthday."
"That doesn't change the fact that I'm two years older."
"What of it? If it counted for anything, I wouldn't be lovin'
you, would I? Your mother was dead right. Love's the big stuff.
It's what counts. Don't you see? I juat love you, an' I gotta
have you. It's natural, I guess; and I've always found with
horses, dogs, and other folks, that what's natural is right.
There's no gettin' away from it, Saxon; I gotta have you, an' I'm
just hopin' hard you gotta have me. Maybe my hands ain't soft
like bookkeepers' an' clerks, but they can work for you, an'
fight like Sam Hill for you, and, Saxon, they can love you."
The old sex antagonism which she had always experienced with men
seemed to have vanished. She had no sense of being on the
defensive. This was no game. It was what she had been looking for
and dreaming about. Before Billy she was defenseless, and there
was an all-satisfaction in the knowledge. She could deny him
nothing. Not even if he proved to be like the others. And out of
the greatness of the thought rose a greater thought--he would not
so prove himself.
She did not speak. Instead, in a glow of spirit and flesh, she
reached out to his left hand and gently tried to remove it from
the rein. He did not understand; but when she persisted he
shifted the rein to his right and let her have her will with the
other hand. Her head bent over it, and she kissed the teamster
callouses.
For the moment he was stunned.
"You mean it?" he stammered.
For reply, she kissed the hand again and murmured:
"I love your hands, Billy. To me they are the most beautiful
hands in the world, and it would take hours of talking to tell
you all they mean to me."
"Whoa!" he called to the horses.
He pulled them in to a standstill, soothed them with his voice,
and made the reins fast around the whip. Then he turned to her
with arms around her and lips to lips.
"Oh, Billy, I'll make you a good wife," she sobbed, when the kiss
was broken.
He kissed her wet eyes and found her lips again.
"Now you know what I was thinkin' and why I was sweatin' when we
was eatin' lunch. Just seemed I couldn't hold in much longer from
tellin' you. Why, you know, you looked good to me from the first
moment I spotted you."
"And I think I loved you from that first day, too, Billy. And I
was so proud of you all that day, you were so kind and gentle,
and so strong, and the way the men all respected you and the
girls all wanted you, and the way you fought those three Irishmen
when I was behind the picnic table. I couldn't love or marry a
man I wasn't proud of, and I'm so proud of you, so proud."
"Not half as much as I am right now of myself," he answered, "for
having won you. It's too good to he true. Maybe the alarm
clock'll go off and wake me up in a couple of minutes. Well,
anyway, if it does, I'm goin' to make the best of them two
minutes first. Watch out I don't eat you, I'm that hungry for
you."
He smothered her in an embrace, holding her so tightly to him
that it almost hurt. After what was to her an age-long period of
bliss, his arms relaxed and he seemed to make an effort to draw
himself together.
"An' the clock ain't gone off yet," he whispered against her
cheek. "And it's a dark night, an' there's Fruitvale right ahead,
an' if there ain't King and Prince standin' still in the middle
of the road. I never thought the time'd come when I wouldn't want
to take the ribbons on a fine pair of horses. But this is that
time. I just can't let go of you, and I've gotta some time
to-night. It hurts worse'n poison, but here goes."
He restored her to herself, tucked the disarranged robe about
her, and chirruped to the impatient team.
Half an hour later he called "Whoa!"
"I know I'm awake now, but I don't know but maybe I dreamed all
the rest, and I just want to make sure."
And again be made the reins fast and took her in his arms. _
Read next: BOOK I: CHAPTER XII
Read previous: BOOK I: CHAPTER X
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