rough the partition, still standing on the
chair, one hand tipping the mirror forward and back, so that she was
able to run her eyes from the reflection of her ankles and calves to her
face, warm with color and roguishly alive.

"Yes?" she heard him answer.

"I'm loving myself," she called back.

"What's the game?" came his puzzled query. "What are you so stuck on
yourself for!"

"Because you love me," she answered. "I love every bit of me, Billy,
because... because... well, because you love every bit of me."

CHAPTER XIX

Between feeding and caring for Billy, doing the housework, making plans,
and selling her store of pretty needlework, the days flew happily for
Saxon. Billy's consent to sell her pretties had been hard to get, but at
last she succeeded in coaxing it out of him.

"It's only the ones I haven't used," she urged; "and I can always make
more when we get settled somewhere."

What she did not sell, along with the household linen and hers and
Billy's spare clothing, she arranged to store with Tom.

"Go ahead," Billy said. "This is your picnic. What you say goes. You're
Robinson Crusoe an' I'm your man Friday. Make up your mind yet which way
you're goin' to travel?"

Saxon shook her head.

"Or how?"

She held up one foot and then the other, encased in stout walking shoes
which she had begun that morning to break in about the house. "Shank's
mare, eh?"

"It's the way our people came into the West," she said proudly.

"It'll be regular trampin', though," he argued. "An' I never heard of a
woman tramp."

"Then here's one. Why, Billy, there's no shame in tramping. My mother
tramped most of the way across the Plains. And 'most everybody else's
mother tramped across in those days. I don't care what people will
think. I guess our race has been on the tramp since the beginning of
creation, just like we'll be, looking for a piece of land that looked
good to settle down on."

After a few days, when his scalp was sufficiently healed and the
bone-knitting was nicely in process, Billy was able to be up and about.
He was still quite helpless, however, with both his arms in splints.

Doctor Hentley not only agreed, but himself suggested, that his bill
should wait against better times for settlement. Of government land, in
response to Saxon's eager questioning, he knew nothing, except that he
had a hazy idea that the days of government land were over.

Tom, on the contrary, was confident that there