bout a block back," she said, "I saw a man with hip disease. You might
go and beat him up."

Of one extravagance Saxon was guilty in the course of the brief
engagement period. A full day's wages she spent in the purchase of half
a dozen cabinet photographs of herself. Billy had insisted that life was
unendurable could he not look upon her semblance the last thing when he
went to bed at night and the first thing when he got up in the morning.
In return, his photographs, one conventional and one in the stripped
fighting costume of the ring, ornamented her looking glass. It was while
gazing at the latter that she was reminded of her wonderful mother's
tales of the ancient Saxons and sea-foragers of the English coasts. From
the chest of drawers that had crossed the plains she drew forth another
of her several precious heirloom--a scrap-book of her mother's in which
was pasted much of the fugitive newspaper verse of pioneer California
days. Also, there were copies of paintings and old wood engravings from
the magazines of a generation and more before.

Saxon ran the pages with familiar fingers and stopped at the picture she
was seeking. Between bold headlands of rock and under a gray cloud-blown
sky, a dozen boats, long and lean and dark, beaked like monstrous birds,
were landing on a foam-whitened beach of sand. The men in the boats,
half naked, huge-muscled and fair-haired, wore winged helmets. In their
hands were swords and spears, and they were leaping, waist-deep, into
the sea-wash and wading ashore. Opposed to them, contesting the landing,
were skin-clad savages, unlike Indians, however, who clustered on the
beach or waded into the water to their knees. The first blows were being
struck, and here and there the bodies of the dead and wounded rolled in
the surf. One fair-haired invader lay across the gunwale of a boat, the
manner of his death told by the arrow that transfixed his breast. In the
air, leaping past him into the water, sword in hand, was Billy. There
was no mistaking it. The striking blondness, the face, the eyes, the
mouth were the same. The very expression on the face was what had been
on Billy's the day of the picnic when he faced the three wild Irishmen.

Somewhere out of the ruck of those warring races had emerged Billy's
ancestors, and hers, was her afterthought, as she closed the book and
put it back in the drawer. And some of those ancestors had made this
ancient and battered chest of drawers which