certain she did know, but she shook her head. She wanted to
hear him say it.

"Why, the second Sunday I knew you, when we drove out to Moraga Valley
behind Prince and King. You spread the lunch that day."

"Only it was a more scrumptious lunch," she added, with a happy smile.

"But I wonder why we didn't have coffee that day," he went on.

"Perhaps it would have been too much like housekeeping," she laughed;
"kind of what Mary would call indelicate--"

"Or raw," Billy interpolated. "She was always springin' that word."

"And yet look what became of her."

"That's the way with all of them," Billy growled somberly. "I've always
noticed it's the fastidious, la-de-da ones that turn out the rottenest.
They're like some horses I know, a-shyin' at the things they're the
least afraid of."

Saxon was silent, oppressed by a sadness, vague and remote, which the
mention of Bert's widow had served to bring on.

"I know something else that happened that day which you'd never guess,"
Billy reminisced. "I bet you couldn't.

"I wonder," Saxon murmured, and guessed it with her eyes.

Billy's eyes answered, and quite spontaneously he reached over, caught
her hand, and pressed it caressingly to his cheek.

"It's little, but oh my," he said, addressing the imprisoned hand.
Then he gazed at Saxon, and she warmed with his words. "We're beginnin'
courtin' all over again, ain't we?"

Both ate heartily, and Billy was guilty of three cups of coffee.

"Say, this country air gives some appetite," he mumbled, as he sank his
teeth into his fifth bread-and-meat sandwich. "I could eat a horse, an'
drown his head off in coffee afterward."

Saxon's mind had reverted to all the young lineman had told her, and
she completed a sort of general resume of the information. "My!" she
exclaimed, "but we've learned a lot!"

"An' we've sure learned one thing," Billy said. "An' that is that this
is no place for us, with land a thousan' an acre an' only twenty dollars
in our pockets."

"Oh, we're not going to stop here," she hastened to say.

"But just the same it's the Portuguese that gave it its price, and they
make things go on it--send their children to school... and have them;
and, as you said yourself, they're as fat as butterballs."

"An' I take my hat off to them," Billy responded.

"But all the same, I'd sooner have forty acres at a hundred an acre than
four at a thousan' an acre. Somehow, you know, I'd be scared stiff on
four acres--