prison-cells. Nor had they freedom of movement. When
old Gow Yum needed to go to San Francisco to sign certain papers
before the Chinese Consul, permission had first to be obtained from
San Quentin. Then, too, neither man was nasty tempered. Saxon had been
apprehensive of the task of bossing two desperate convicts; but when
they came she found it a pleasure to work with them. She could tell them
what to do, but it was they who knew how do. Prom them she learned all
the ten thousand tricks and quirks of artful gardening, and she was not
long in realizing how helpless she would have been had she depended on
local labor.

Still further, she had no fear, because she was not alone. She had
been using her head. It was quickly apparent to her that she could not
adequately oversee the outside work and at the same time do the house
work. She wrote to Ukiah to the energetic widow who had lived in the
adjoining house and taken in washing. She had promptly closed with
Saxon's offer. Mrs. Paul was forty, short in stature, and weighed two
hundred pounds, but never wearied on her feet. Also she was devoid of
fear, and, according to Billy, could settle the hash of both Chinese
with one of her mighty arms. Mrs. Paul arrived with her son, a country
lad of sixteen who knew horses and could milk Hilda, the pretty Jersey
which had successfully passed Edmund's expert eye. Though Mrs. Paul ably
handled the house, there was one thing Saxon insisted on doing--namely,
washing her own pretty flimsies.

"When I 'm no longer able to do that," she told Billy, "you can take
a spade to that clump of redwoods beside Wild Water and dig a hole. It
will be time to bury me."

It was early in the days of Madrono Ranch, at the time of Mrs.
Mortimer's second visit, that Billy drove in with a load of pipe; and
house, chicken yards, and barn were piped from the second-hand tank he
installed below the house-spring.

"Huh! I guess I can use my head," he said. "I watched a woman over on
the other side of the valley, packin' water two hundred feet from the
spring to the house; an' I did some figurin'. I put it at three trips a
day and on wash days a whole lot more; an' you can't guess what I made
out she traveled a year packin' water. One hundred an' twenty-two miles.
D'ye get that? One hundred and twenty-two miles! I asked her how long
she'd been there. Thirty-one years. Multiply it for yourself. Three
thousan', seven hundred an' eighty-two miles--all for the