hers, and his face was a sudden, radiant dawn.

"Put her there!" he cried, their hands meeting and clasping. "You're the
truest true blue wife a man ever had. If all the other fellows' wives
was like you, we could win any strike we tackled."

"What would you have done if you weren't married, Billy?"

"Seen 'em in hell first."

"Than it doesn't make any difference being married. I've got to stand by
you in everything you stand for. I'd be a nice wife if I didn't."

She remembered her caller of the afternoon, and knew the moment was too
propitious to let pass.

"There was a man here this afternoon, Billy. He wanted a room. I told
him I'd speak to you. He said he would pay six dollars a month for the
back bedroom. That would pay half a month's installment on the furniture
and buy a sack of flour, and we're all out of flour."

Billy's old hostility to the idea was instantly uppermost, and Saxon
watched him anxiously.

"Some scab in the shops, I suppose?"

"No; he's firing on the freight run to San Jose. Harmon, he said his
name was, James Harmon. They've just transferred him from the Truckee
division. He'll sleep days mostly, he said; and that's why he wanted a
quiet house without children in it."

In the end, with much misgiving, and only after Saxon had insistently
pointed out how little work it entailed on her, Billy consented, though
he continued to protest, as an afterthought:

"But I don't want you makin' beds for any man. It ain't right, Saxon. I
oughta take care of you."

"And you would," she flashed back at him, "if you'd take the
foremanship. Only you can't. It wouldn't be right. And if I'm to stand
by you it's only fair to let me do what I can."

James Harmon proved even less a bother than Saxon had anticipated. For
a fireman he was scrupulously clean, always washing up in the roundhouse
before he came home. He used the key to the kitchen door, coming and
going by the back steps. To Saxon he barely said how-do-you-do or good
day; and, sleeping in the day time and working at night, he was in the
house a week before Billy laid eyes on him.

Billy had taken to coming home later and later, and to going out after
supper by himself. He did not offer to tell Saxon where he went. Nor did
she ask. For that matter it required little shrewdness on her part to
guess. The fumes of whisky were on his lips at such times. His slow,
deliberate ways were even slower, even more deliberate. Liquor did
not affect hi