had crossed the salt ocean
and the plains and been pierced 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 Pine
Street cottage, making a cold lunch of sandwiches, tamales, and bottled
beer. It being Sunday, the four were free from work, and they had come
early, to work harder than on any week day, washing walls and windows,
scrubbing floors, laying carpets and linoleum, hanging curtains, setting
up the stove, putting the kitchen utensils and dishes away, and placing
the furniture.

"Go on with the story, Saxon," Mary begged. "I'm just dyin' to hear. And
Bert, you just shut up and listen."

"Well, that winter was when Del Hancock showed up. He was Kentucky born,
but he'd been in the West for years. He was a scout, like Kit Carson,
and he knew him well. Many's a time Kit Carson and he slept under the
same blankets. They were together to California and Oregon with General
Fremont. Well, Del Hancock was passing on his way through Salt Lake,
going I don't know where to raise a company of Rocky Mountain trappers
to go after beaver some new place he knew about. Ha was a handsome man.
He wore his hair long like in pictures, and had a silk sash around
his waist he'd learned to wear in Califo