he comes out. Cal's mother wouldn't
let 'm go swimmin', an' whenever she suspected she always licked his
hair with her tongue. If it tasted salty, he got a beltin'. But he was
onto himself. Comin' home, he'd jump somebody's front fence an' hold his
head under a faucet."

"I used to dance with Chester Johnson," Saxon said. "And I knew his
wife, Kittie Brady, long and long ago. She had next place at the table
to me in the paper-box factory. She's gone to San Francisco to her
married sister's. She's going to have a baby, too. She was awfully
pretty, and there was always a string of fellows after her."

The effect of the conviction and severe sentences was a bad one on
the union men. Instead of being disheartening, it intensified the
bitterness. Billy's repentance for having fought and the sweetness and
affection which had flashed up in the days of Saxon's nursing of him
were blotted out. At home, he scowled and brooded, while his talk took
on the tone of Bert's in the last days ere that Mohegan died. Also,
Billy stayed away from home longer hours, and was again steadily
drinking.

Saxon well-nigh abandoned hope. Almost was she steeled to the inevitable
tragedy which her morbid fancy painted in a thousand guises. Oftenest,
it was of Billy being brought home on a stretcher. Sometimes it was a
call to the telephone in the corner grocery and the curt information by
a strange voice that her husband was lying in the receiving hospital or
the morgue. And when the mysterious horse-poisoning cases occurred, and
when the residence of one of the teaming magnates was half destroyed by
dynamite, she saw Billy in prison, or wearing stripes, or mounting to
the scaffold at San Quentin while at the same time she could see the
little cottage on Pine street besieged by newspaper reporters and
photographers.

Yet her lively imagination failed altogether to anticipate the real
catastrophe. Harmon, the fireman lodger, passing through the kitchen on
his way out to work, had paused to tell Saxon about the previous day's
train-wreck in the Alviso marshes, and of how the engineer, imprisoned
under the overturned engine and unhurt, being drowned by the rising
tide, had begged to be shot. Billy came in at the end of the narrative,
and from the somber light in his heavy-lidded eyes Saxon knew he had
been drinking. He glowered at Harmon, and, without greeting to him or
Saxon, leaned his shoulder against the wall.

Harmon felt the awkwardness of t