rnia from the Spanish, and two
revolvers in his belt. Any woman 'd fall in love with him first sight.
Well, he saw Sadie, who was my mother's oldest sister, and I guess she
looked good to him, for he stopped right there in Salt Lake and didn't
go a step. He was a great Indian fighter, too, and I heard my Aunt Villa
say, when I was a little girl, that he had the blackest, brightest eyes,
and that the way he looked was like an eagle. He'd fought duels, too,
the way they did in those days, and he wasn't afraid of anything.

"Sadie was a beauty, and she flirted with him and drove him crazy. Maybe
she wasn't sure of her own mind, I don't know. But I do know that she
didn't give in as easy as I did to Billy. Finally, he couldn't stand it
any more. Ha rode up that night on horseback, wild as could be. 'Sadie,'
he said, 'if you don't promise to marry me to-morrow, I'll shoot myself
to-night right back of the corral.' And he'd have done it, too, and
Sadie knew it, and said she would. Didn't they make love fast in those
days?"

"Oh, I don't know," Mary sniffed. "A week after you first laid eyes on
Billy you was engaged. Did Billy say he was going to shoot himself back
of the laundry if you turned him down?"

"I didn't give him a chance," Saxon confessed. "Anyway Del Hancock and
Aunt Sadie got married next day. And they were very happy afterward,
only she died. And after that he was killed, with General Custer and all
the rest, by the Indians. He was an old man by then, but I guess he
got his share of Indians before they got him. Men like him always died
fighting, and they took their dead with them. I used to know Al Stanley
when I was a little girl. He was a gambler, but he was game. A railroad
man shot him in the back when he was sitting at a table. That shot
killed him, too. He died in about two seconds. But before he died he'd
pulled his gun and put three bullets into the man that killed him."

"I don't like fightin'," Mary protested. "It makes me nervous. Bert
gives me the willies the way he's always lookin' for trouble. There
ain't no sense in it."

"And I wouldn't give a snap of my fingers for a man without fighting
spirit," Saxon answered. "Why, we wouldn't be here to-day if it wasn't
for the fighting spirit of our people before us."

"You've got the real goods of a fighter in Billy," Bert assured her; "a
yard long and a yard wide and genuine A Number One, long-fleeced wool.
Billy's a Mohegan with a scalp-lock, that'