'You can't,' Saxon laughed. 'It's community property.'
He grunted spasmodically, as if the breath had been knocked out of him.
'Straight on the solar plexus,' he said, 'an' me down for the count. But say, them's sweet words, ain't they-community property.' He rolled them over and off his tongue with keen relish. 'An' when we got married the top of our ambition was a steady job an' some rags an' sticks of furniture all paid up an' half-worn out. We wouldn't have had any community property only for you.'
'What nonsense! What could I have done by myself? You know very well that you earned all the money that started us here. You paid the wages of Gow Yum and Chan Chi, and old Hughie, and Mrs. Paul, and-why, you've done it all.'
She drew her two hands caressingly across his shoulders and down along his great biceps muscles.
'That's what did it, Billy.'
'Aw hell! It's your head that done it. What was my muscles good for with no head to run 'em,-sluggin' scabs, beatin' up lodgers, an' crookin' the elbow over a bar. The only sensible thing my head ever done was when it run me into you. Honest to God, Saxon, you've been the makin' of me.'
'Aw hell, Billy,' she mimicked in the way that delighted him, 'where would I have been if you hadn't taken me out of the laundry? I couldn't take myself out. I was just a helpless girl. I'd have been there yet if it hadn't been for you. Mrs. Mortimer had five thousand dollars; but I had you.'
'A woman ain't got the chance to help herself that a man has,' he generalized. 'I'll tell you what: It took the two of us. It's been team-work. We've run in span. If we'd a-run single, you might still be in the laundry; an', if I was lucky, I'd be still drivin' team by the day an' sportin' around to cheap dances.'
Saxon stood under the father of all madronos, watching Hazel and Hattie go out the gate, the full vegetable wagon behind them, when she saw Billy ride in, leading a sorrel mare from whose silken coat the sun flashed golden lights.
'Four-year-old, high-life, a handful, but no vicious tricks,' Billy chanted, as he stopped beside Saxon. 'Skin like tissue paper, mouth like silk, but kill the toughest broncho ever foaled-look at them lungs an' nostrils. They call her Ramona-some Spanish name: sired by Morellita outa genuine Morgan stock.'
'And they will sell her?' Saxon gasped, standing with hands clasped in inarticulate delight.
'That's what I brought her to show you for.'
'But how much must they want for her?' was Saxon's next question, so impossible did it seem that such an amazement of horse-flesh could ever be hers.
'That ain't your business,' Billy answered brusquely. 'The brickyard's payin' for her, not the vegetable ranch. She's yourn at the word. What d'ye say?'
'I'll tell you in a minute.'
Saxon was trying to mount, but the animal danced nervously away.
'Hold on till I tie,' Billy said. 'She ain't skirt-broke, that's the trouble.'
Saxon tightly gripped reins and mane, stepped with spurred foot on Billy's hand, and was lifted lightly into the saddle.
'She's used to spurs,' Billy called after. 'Spanish broke, so don't check her quick. Come in gentle. An' talk to her. She's high-life, you know.'
Saxon nodded, dashed out the gate and down the road, waved a hand to Clara Hastings as she passed the gate of Trillium Covert, and continued up Wild Water canyon.
When she came back, Ramona in a pleasant lather, Saxon rode to the rear of the house, past the chicken houses and the flourishing berry-rows, to join Billy on the rim of the bench, where he sat on his horse in the shade, smoking a cigarette. Together they looked down through an opening among the trees to the meadow which was a meadow no longer. With mathematical accuracy it was divided into squares, oblongs, and narrow strips, which displayed sharply the thousand hues of green of a truck garden. Gow Yum and Chan Chi, under enormous Chinese grass hats, were planting green onions. Old Hughie, hoe in hand, plodded along the main artery of running water, opening certain laterals, closing others. From the work-shed beyond the barn the strokes of a hammer told Saxon that Carlsen was wire-binding vegetable boxes. Mrs. Paul's cheery soprano, lifted in a hymn, doated through the trees, accompanied by the whirr of an egg-beater. A sharp barking told where Possum still waged hysterical and baffled war on the Douglass squirrels. Billy took a long draw from his cigarette, exhaled the smoke, and continued to look down at the meadow. Saxon divined trouble in his manner. His rein-hand was on the pommel, and her free hand went out and softly rested on his. Billy turned his slow gaze upon her mare's lather, seeming not to note it, and continued on to Saxon's face.
'Huh!' he equivocated, as if waking up. 'Them San Leandro Porchugeeze ain't got nothin' on us when it comes to intensive farmin'. Look at that water runnin'. You know, it seems so good to me that sometimes I just wanta get down on hands an' knees an' lap it all up myself.'
'Oh, to have all the water you want in a climate like this!' Saxon exclaimed.
'An' don't be scared of it ever goin' back on you. If the rains fooled you, there's Sonoma Creek alongside. All we gotta do is install a gasolene pump.'
'But we'll never have to, Billy. I was talking with 'Redwood' Thompson. He's lived in the valley since Fifty- three, and he says there's never been a failure of crops on account of drought. We always get our rain.'
'Come on, let's go for a ride,' he said abruptly. 'You've got the time.'
'All right, if you'll tell me what's bothering you.'
He looked at her quickly.
'Nothin',' he grunted. 'Yes, there is, too. What's the difference? You'd know it sooner or later. You ought to see old Chavon. His face is that long he can't walk without bumpin' his knee on his chin. His gold-mine's peterin' out.'
'Gold mine!'
'His clay pit. It's the same thing. He's gettin' twenty cents a yard for it from the brickyard.'
'And that means the end of your teaming contract.' Saxon saw the disaster in all its hugeness. 'What about the brickyard people?'
'Worried to death, though they've kept secret about it. They've had men out punchin' holes all over the hills for a week, an' that Jap chemist settin' up nights analyzin' the rubbish they've brought in. It's peculiar stuff, that clay, for what they want it for, an' you don't find it everywhere. Them experts that reported on Chavon's pit made one hell of a mistake. Maybe they was lazy with their borin's. Anyway, they slipped up on the amount of clay they was in it. Now don't get to botherin'. It'd come out somehow. You can't do nothin'.'
'But I can,' Saxon insisted. 'We won't buy Ramona.'
'You ain't got a thing to do with that,' he answered. 'I 'm buyin' her, an' her price don't cut any figure alongside the big game I 'm playin'. Of course, I can always sell my horses. But that puts a stop to their makin' money, an' that brickyard contract was fat.'
'But if you get some of them in on the road work for the county?' she suggested.
'Oh, I got that in mind. An' I 'm keepin' my eyes open. They's a chance the quarry will start again, an' the fellow that did that teamin' has gone to Puget Sound. An' what if I have to sell out most of the horses? Here's you and the vegetable business. That's solid. We just don't go ahead so fast for a time, that's all. I ain't scared of the country any more. I sized things up as we went along. They ain't a jerk burg we hit all the time on the road that I couldn't jump into an' make a go. An' now where d'you want to ride?'
CHAPTER XXII
They cantered out the gate, thundered across the bridge, and passed Trillium Covert before they pulled in on the grade of Wild Water Canyon. Saxon had chosen her field on the big spur of Sonoma Mountains as the objective of their ride.
'Say, I bumped into something big this mornin' when I was goin' to fetch Ramona,' Billy said, the clay pit trouble banished for the time. 'You know the hundred an' forty. I passed young Chavon along the road, an'-I don't know why-just for ducks, I guess-I up an' asked 'm if he thought the old man would lease the hundred an' forty to
