om 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 surprise 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