ther's sword, the while she
visioned him, as she always did, astride his roan warhorse. With the old
religious awe, she pored over her mother's poems in the scrap-book, and
clasped her mother's red satin Spanish girdle about her in a farewell
embrace. She unpacked the scrap-book in order to gaze a last time at the
wood engraving of the Vikings, sword in hand, leaping upon the English
sands. Again she identified Billy as one of the Vikings, and pondered
for a space on the strange wanderings of the seed from which she sprang.
Always had her race been land-hungry, and she took delight in believing
she had bred true; for had not she, despite her life passed in a city,
found this same land-hunger in her? And was she not going forth to
satisfy that hunger, just as her people of old time had done, as her
father and mother before her? She remembered her mother's tale of how
the promised land looked to them as their battered wagons and weary oxen
dropped down through the early winter snows of the Sierras to the vast
and flowering sun-land of California: In fancy, herself a child of nine,
she looked down from the snowy heights as her mother must have looked
down. She recalled and repeated aloud one of her mother's stanzas:

"'Sweet as a wind-lute's airy strains Your gentle muse has learned to
sing And California's boundless plains Prolong the soft notes echoing.'"

She sighed happily and dried her eyes. Perhaps the hard times were
past. Perhaps they had constituted HER Plains, and she and Billy had won
safely across and were even then climbing the Sierras ere they dropped
down into the pleasant valley land.

Salinger's wagon was at the house, taking out the furniture, the morning
they left. The landlord, standing at the gate, received the keys, shook
hands with them, and wished them luck. "You're goin' at it right," he
congratulated them. "Sure an' wasn't it under me roll of blankets I
tramped into Oakland meself forty year ago! Buy land, like me, when it's
cheap. It'll keep you from the poorhouse in your old age. There's plenty
of new towns springin' up. Get in on the ground floor. The work of your
hands'll keep you in food an' under a roof, an' the lend 'll make you
well to do. An' you know me address. When you can spare send me along
that small bit of rent. An' good luck. An' don't mind what people think.
'Tis them that looks that finds."

Curious neighbors peeped from behind the blinds as Billy and Saxon
strode up the stre