ith flashing eye of scorn. "Why, I've crossed
it when it was howlin' an' when the scow schooner sailors said I lied
an' that I didn't. Huh! They were only squareheads. Why, we licked their
kind thousands of years ago. We lick everything we go up against. We've
wandered all over the world, licking the world. On the sea, on the land,
it's all the same. Look at Ivory Nelson, look at Davy Crockett, look at
Paul Jones, look at Clive, an' Kitchener, an' Fremont, an' Kit Carson,
an' all of 'em."

Saxon nodded, while he continued, her own eyes shining, and it came to
her what a glory it would be to be the mother of a man-child like this.
Her body ached with the fancied quickening of unborn life. A good stock,
a good stock, she thought to herself. Then she thought of herself and
Billy, healthy shoots of that same stock, yet condemned to childlessness
because of the trap of the manmade world and the curse of being herded
with the stupid ones.

She came back to the boy.

"My father was a soldier in the Civil War," he was telling her, "a scout
an' a spy. The rebels were going to hang him twice for a spy. At the
battle of Wilson's Creek he ran half a mile with his captain wounded on
his back. He's got a bullet in his leg right now, just above the knee.
It's been there all these years. He let me feel it once. He was a
buffalo hunter and a trapper before the war. He was sheriff of his
county when he was twenty years old. An' after the war, when he was
marshal of Silver City, he cleaned out the bad men an' gun-fighters.
He's been in almost every state in the Union. He could wrestle any man
at the railings in his day, an' he was bully of the raftsmen of the
Susquehanna when he was only a youngster. His father killed a man in a
standup fight with a blow of his fist when he was sixty years old. An'
when he was seventy-four, his second wife had twins, an' he died when he
was plowing in the field with oxen when he was ninety-nine years old. He
just unyoked the oxen, an' sat down under a tree, an' died there sitting
up. An' my father's just like him. He's pretty old now, but he ain't
afraid of nothing. He's a regular Anglo-Saxon, you see. He's a special
policeman, an' he didn't do a thing to the strikers in some of the
fightin'. He had his face all cut up with a rock, but he broke his club
short off over some hoodlum's head."

He paused breathlessly and looked at her.

"Gee!" he said. "I'd hate to a-ben that hoodlum."

"My name is Sax