"Well, suppose you an' me go buggy-riding all day out in the hills?"

She did not answer immediately, and for the moment she was seeing the
nightmare vision of her last buggy-ride; of her fear and her leap from
the buggy; and of the long miles and the stumbling through the darkness
in thin-soled shoes that bruised her feet on every rock. And then it
came to her with a great swell of joy that this man beside her was not
such a man.

"I love horses," she said. "I almost love them better than I do dancing,
only I don't know anything about them. My father rode a great roan
war-horse. He was a captain of cavalry, you know. I never saw him, but
somehow I always can see him on that big horse, with a sash around his
waist and his sword at his side. My brother George has the sword now,
but Tom--he's the brother I live with says it is mine because it wasn't
his father's. You see, they're only my half-brothers. I was the only
child by my mother's second marriage. That was her real marriage--her
love-marriage, I mean."

Saxon ceased abruptly, embarrassed by her own garrulity; and yet the
impulse was strong to tell this young man all about herself, and it
seemed to her that these far memories were a large part of her.

"Go on an' tell me about it," Billy urged. "I like to hear about the old
people of the old days. My people was along in there, too, an' somehow
I think it was a better world to live in than now. Things was more
sensible and natural. I don't exactly say what I mean. But it's like
this: I don't understand life to-day. There's the labor unions an'
employers' associations, an' strikes', an' hard times, an' huntin'
for jobs, an' all the rest. Things wasn't like that in the old days.
Everybody farmed, an' shot their meat, an' got enough to eat, an'
took care of their old folks. But now it's all a mix-up that I can't
understand. Mebbe I'm a fool, I don't know. But, anyway, go ahead an'
tell us about your mother."

"Well, you see, when she was only a young woman she and Captain Brown
fell in love. He was a soldier then, before the war. And he was ordered
East for the war when she was away nursing her sister Laura. And then
came the news that he was killed at Shiloh. And she married a man who
had loved her for years and years. He was a boy in the same wagon-train
coming across the plains. She liked him, but she didn't love him. And
afterward came the news that my father wasn't killed after all. So it
made her very sad, bu