r hands small water-pails,
step forth into the sunshine on the flower-grown open ground from the
wagon circle, wheels interlocked, where the wounded screamed their
delirium and babbled of flowing fountains, and go on, through the
sunshine and the wonder-inhibition of the bullet-dealing Indians, a
hundred yards to the waterhole and back again.

Saxon kissed the little, red satin Spanish girdle passionately, and
wrapped it up in haste, with dewy eyes, abandoning the mystery and
godhead of mother and all the strange enigma of living.

In bed, she projected against her closed eyelids the few rich scenes of
her mother that her child-memory retained. It was her favorite way
of wooing sleep. She had done it all her life--sunk into the
death-blackness of sleep with her mother limned to the last on her
fading consciousness. But this mother was not the Daisy of the plains
nor of the daguerreotype. They had been before Saxon's time. This that
she saw nightly was an older mother, broken with insomnia and brave
with sorrow, who crept, always crept, a pale, frail creature, gentle
and unfaltering, dying from lack of sleep, living by will, and by will
refraining from going mad, who, nevertheless, could not will sleep, and
whom not even the whole tribe of doctors could make sleep. Crept--always
she crept, about the house, from weary bed to weary chair and back again
through long days and weeks of torment, never complaining, though her
unfailing smile was twisted with pain, and the wise gray eyes, still
wise and gray, were grown unutterably larger and profoundly deep.

But on this night Saxon did not win to sleep quickly; the little
creeping mother came and went; and in the intervals the face of Billy,
with the cloud-drifted, sullen, handsome eyes, burned against her
eyelids. And once again, as sleep welled up to smother her, she put to
herself the question IS THIS THE MAN?

CHAPTER VII

Tun work in the ironing-room slipped off, but the three days until
Wednesday night were very long. She hummed over the fancy starch that
flew under the iron at an astounding rate.

"I can't see how you do it," Mary admired. "You'll make thirteen or
fourteen this week at that rate."

Saxon laughed, and in the steam from the iron she saw dancing golden
letters that spelled WEDNESDAY.

"What do you think of Billy?" Mary asked.

"I like him," was the frank answer.

"Well, don't let it go farther than that."

"I will if I want to," Saxon ret