'Well, wouldn't it be worse if you intended staying on in Oakland where it might happen again?'
'I can see myself becomin' a farmer an' plowin' with a pair of pipe-stems like these,' he persisted.
'Doctor Hentley says they'll be stronger at the break than ever before. And you know yourself that's true of clean-broken bones. Now you close your eyes and go to sleep. You're all done up, and you need to keep your brain quiet and stop thinking.'
He closed his eyes obediently. She slipped a cool hand under the nape of his neck and let it rest.
'That feels good,' he murmured. 'You're so cool, Saxon. Your hand, and you, all of you. Bein' with you is like comin' out into the cool night after dancin' in a hot room.'
After several minutes of quiet, he began to giggle.
'What is it?' she asked.
'Oh, nothin'. I was just thinkin'-thinking of them mutts doin' me up-me, that's done up more scabs than I can remember.'
Next morning Billy awoke with his blues dissipated. From the kitchen Saxon heard him painfully wrestling strange vocal acrobatics.
'I got a new song you never heard,' he told her when she came in with a cup of coffee. 'I only remember the chorus though. It's the old man talkin' to some hobo of a hired man that wants to marry his daughter. Mamie, that Billy Murphy used to run with before he got married, used to sing it. It's a kind of a sobby song. It used to always give Mamie the weeps. Here's the way the chorus goes-an' remember, it's the old man spielin'.'
And with great solemnity and excruciating Batting, Billy sang:
'O treat my daughter kind-i-ly; An' say you'll do no harm, An' when I die I'll will to you My little house an' farm-My horse, my plow, my sheep, my cow, An' all them little chickens in the ga-a-rden.
'It's them little chickens in the garden that gets me,' he explained. 'That's how I remembered it-from the chickens in the movin' pictures yesterday. An' some day we'll have little chickens in the garden, won't we, old girl?'
'And a daughter, too,' Saxon amplified.
'An' I'll be the old geezer sayin' them same words to the hired man,' Billy carried the fancy along. 'It don't take long to raise a daughter if you ain't in a hurry.'
Saxon took her long-neglected ukulele from its case and strummed it into tune.
'And I've a song you never heard, Billy. Tom's always singing it. He's crazy about taking up government land and going farming, only Sarah won't think of it. He sings it something like this:
'We'll have a little farm, A pig, a horse, a cow, And you will drive the wagon, And I will drive the plow.'
'Only in this case I guess it's me that'll do the plowin',' Billy approved. 'Say, Saxon, sing 'Harvest Days.' That's a farmer's song, too.'
After that she feared the coffee was growing cold and compelled Billy to take it. In the helplessness of two broken arms, he had to be fed like a baby, and as she fed him they talked.
'I'll tell you one thing,' Billy said, between mouthfuls. 'Once we get settled down in the country you'll have that horse you've been wishin' for all your life. An' it'll be all your own, to ride, drive, sell, or do anything you want with.'
And, again, he ruminated: 'One thing that'll come handy in the country is that I know horses; that's a big start. I can always get a job at that-if it ain't at union wages. An' the other things about farmin' I can learn fast enough.-Say, d'ye remember that day you first told me about wantin' a horse to ride all your life?'
Saxon remembered, and it was only by a severe struggle that she was able to keep the tears from welling into her eyes. She seemed bursting with happiness, and she was remembering many things-all the warm promise of life with Billy that had been hers in the days before hard times. And now the promise was renewed again. Since its fulfillment had not come to them, they were going away to fulfill it for themselves and make the moving pictures come true.
Impelled by a half-feigned fear, she stole away into the kitchen bedroom where Bert had died, to study her face in the bureau mirror. No, she decided; she was little changed. She was still equipped for the battlefield of love. Beautiful she was not. She knew that. But had not Mercedes said that the great women of history who had won men had not been beautiful? And yet, Saxon insisted, as she gazed at her reflection, she was anything but unlovely. She studied her wide gray eyes that were so very gray, that were always alive with light and vivacities, where, in the surface and depths, always swam thoughts unuttered, thoughts that sank down and dissolved to give place to other thoughts. The brows were excellent-she realized that. Slenderly penciled, a little darker than her light brown hair, they just fitted her irregular nose that was feminine but not weak, that if anything was piquant and that picturesquely might be declared impudent.
She could see that her face was slightly thin, that the red of her lips was not quite so red, and that she had lost some of her quick coloring. But all that would come back again. Her mouth was not of the rosebud type she saw in the magazines. She paid particular attention to it. A pleasant mouth it was, a mouth to be joyous with, a mouth for laughter and to make laughter in others. She deliberately experimented with it, smiled till the corners dented deeper. And she knew that when she smiled her smile was provocative of smiles. She laughed with her eyes alone-a trick of hers. She threw back her head and laughed with eyes and mouth together, between her spread lips showing the even rows of strong white teeth.
And she remembered Billy's praise of her teeth, the night at Germanic Hall after he had told Charley Long he was standing on his foot. 'Not big, and not little dinky baby's teeth either,' Billy had said, '… just right, and they fit you.' Also, he had said that to look at them made him hungry, and that they were good enough to eat.
She recollected all the compliments he had ever paid her. Beyond all treasures, these were treasures to her-the love phrases, praises, and admirations. He had said her skin was cool-soft as velvet, too, and smooth as silk. She rolled up her sleeve to the shoulder, brushed her cheek with the white skin for a test, with deep scrutiny examined the fineness of its texture. And he had told her that she was sweet; that he hadn't known what it meant when they said a girl was sweet, not until he had known her. And he had told her that her voice was cool, that it gave him the feeling her hand did when it rested on his forehead. Her voice went all through him, he had said, cool and fine, like a wind of coolness. And he had likened it to the first of the sea breeze setting in the afternoon after a scorching hot morning. And, also, when she talked low, that it was round and sweet, like the 'cello in the Macdonough Theater orchestra.
He had called her his Tonic Kid. He had called her a thoroughbred, clean-cut and spirited, all fine nerves and delicate and sensitive. He had liked the way she carried her clothes. She carried them like a dream, had been his way of putting it. They were part of her, just as much as the cool of her voice and skin and the scent of her hair.
And her figure! She got upon a chair and tilted the mirror so that she could see herself from hips to feet. She drew her skirt back and up. The slender ankle was just as slender. The calf had lost none of its delicately mature swell. She studied her hips, her waist, her bosom, her neck, the poise of her head, and sighed contentedly. Billy must be right, and he had said that she was built like a French woman, and that in the matter of lines and form she could give Annette Kellerman cards and spades.
He had said so many things, now that she recalled them all at one time. Her lips! The Sunday he proposed he had said: 'I like to watch your lips talking. It's funny, but every move they make looks like a tickly kiss.' And afterward, that same day: 'You looked good to me from the first moment I spotted you.' He had praised her housekeeping. He had said he fed better, lived more comfortably, held up his end with the fellows, and saved money. And she remembered that day when he had crushed her in his arms and declared she was the greatest little bit of a woman that had ever come down the pike.
She ran her eyes over all herself in the mirror again, gathered herself together into a whole, compact and good to look upon-delicious, she knew. Yes, she would do. Magnificent as Billy was in his man way, in her own way she was a match for him. Yes, she had done well by Billy. She deserved much-all he could give her, the best he could give her. But she made no blunder of egotism. Frankly valuing herself, she as frankly valued him. When he was himself, his real self, not harassed by trouble, not pinched by the trap, not maddened by drink, her man-boy and lover, he was well worth all she gave him or could give him.
Saxon gave herself a farewell look. No. She was not dead, any more than was Billy's love dead, than was her love dead. All that was needed was the proper soil, and their love would grow and blossom. And they were turning their backs upon Oakland to go and seek that proper soil.
'Oh, Billy!' she called through the partition, still standing on the chair, one hand tipping the mirror forward
