第107章 CHAPTER I(4)

A mile on from the lineman, they stopped where a small creek, fringed with brush, crossed the county road. Billy was for the cold lunch, which was the last meal Saxon had prepared in the Pine street cottage; but she was determined upon building a fire and boiling coffee. Not that she desired it for herself, but that she was impressed with the idea that everything at the starting of their strange wandering must be as comfortable as possible for Billy's sake. Bent on inspiring him with enthusiasm equal to her own, she declined to dampen what sparks he had caught by anything so uncheerful as a cold meal.

"Now one thing we want to get out of our heads right at the start, Billy, is that we're in a hurry. We're not in a hurry, and we don't care whether school keeps or not. We're out to have a good time, a regular adventure like you read about in books.--My!

I wish that boy that took me fishing to Goat Island could see me now. Oakland was just a place to start from, he said. And, well, we've started, haven't we? And right here's where we stop and boil coffee. You get the fire going, Billy, and I'll get the water and the things ready to spread out."

"Say," Billy remarked, while they waited for the water to boil, "d'ye know what this reminds me of?"

Saxon was 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--scared of fallin' off, you know."

She was in full sympathy with him. In her heart of hearts the forty acres tugged much the harder. In her way, allowing for the difference of a generation, her desire for spaciousness was as strong as her Uncle Will's.

"Well, we're not going to stop here," she assured Billy. "We're going in, not for forty acres, but for a hundred and sixty acres free from the government."

"An' I guess the government owes it to us for what our fathers an' mothers done. I tell you, Saxon, when a woman walks across the plains like your mother done, an' a man an' wife gets massacred by the Indians like my grandfather an' mother done, the government does owe them something."

"Well, it's up to us to collect."

"An' we'll collect all right, all right, somewhere down in them redwood mountains south of Monterey."