"It's one thing the fightin' game's taught me," he said. "To take care of myself. A fellow can't work all day and dance all night and keep in condition. It's the same way with drinkin'--an' not that I'm a little tin angel. I know what it is. I've been soused to the guards an' all the rest of it. I like my beer--big schooners of it; but I don't drink all I want of it. I've tried, but it don't pay. Take that big stiff to-night that butted in on us. He ought to had my number. He's a dog anyway, but besides he had beer bloat. I sized that up the first rattle, an' that's the difference about who takes the other fellow's number. Condition, that's what it is."
"But he is so big," Saxon protested. "Why, his fists are twice as big as yours."
"That don't mean anything. What counts is what's behind the fists. He'd turn loose like a buckin' bronco. If I couldn't drop him at the start, all I'd do is to keep away, smother up, an' wait. An' all of a sudden he'd blow up--go all to pieces, you know, wind, heart, everything, and then I'd have him where I wanted him. And the point is he knows it, too."
"You're the first prizefighter I ever knew," Saxon said, after a pause.
"I'm not any more," he disclaimed hastily. "That's one thing the fightin' game taught me--to leave it alone. It don't pay. A fellow trains as fine as silk--till he's all silk, his skin, everything, and he's fit to live for a hundred years; an' then he climbs through the ropes for a hard twenty rounds with some tough customer that's just as good as he is, and in those twenty rounds he frazzles out all his silk an' blows in a year of his life.
Yes, sometimes he blows in five years of it, or cuts it in half, or uses up all of it. I've watched 'em. I've seen fellows strong as bulls fight a hard battle and die inside the year of consumption, or kidney disease, or anything else. Now what's the good of it? Money can't buy what they throw away. That's why I quit the game and went back to drivin' team. I got my silk, an' I'm goin' to keep it, that's all."
"It must make you feel proud to know you are the master of other men," she said softly, aware herself of pride in the strength and skill of him.
"It does," he admitted frankly. "I'm glad I went into the game--just as glad as I am that I pulled out of it. ... Yep, it's taught me a lot--to keep my eyes open an' my head cool. Oh, I've got a temper, a peach of a temper. I get scared of myself sometimes. I used to be always breakin' loose. But the fightin' taught me to keep down the steam an' not do things I'd be sorry for afterward."
"Why, you're the sweetest, easiest tempered man I know," she interjected.
"Don't you believe it. Just watch me, and sometime you'll see me break out that bad that I won't know what I'm doin' myself. Oh, I'm a holy terror when I get started!"
This tacit promise of continued acquaintance gave Saxon a little joy-thrill.
"Say," he said, as they neared her neighborhood, "what are you doin' next Sunday?"
"Nothing. No plans at all."
"Well, suppose you an' me go buggy-riding all day out in the hills?"
She did not answer immediately, and for the moment she was seeing the nightmare vision of her last buggy-ride; of her fear and her leap from the buggy; and of the long miles and the stumbling through the darkness in thin-soled shoes that bruised her feet on every rock. And then it came to her with a great swell of joy that this man beside her was not such a man.
"I love horses," she said. "I almost love them better than I do dancing, only I don't know anything about them. My father rode a great roan war-horse. He was a captain of cavalry, you know. I never saw him, but somehow I always can see him on that big horse, with a sash around his waist and his sword at his side. My brother George has the sword now, but Tom--he's the brother I live with says it is mine because it wasn't his father's. You see, they're only my half-brothers. I was the only child by my mother's second marriage. That was her real marriage--her love-marriage, I mean."
Saxon ceased abruptly, embarrassed by her own garrulity; and yet the impulse was strong to tell this young man all about herself, and it seemed to her that these far memories were a large part of her.
"Go on an' tell me about it," Billy urged. "I like to hear about the old people of the old days. My people was along in there, too, an' somehow I think it was a better world to live in than now. Things was more sensible and natural. I don't exactly say what I mean. But it's like this: I don't understand life to-day.
There's the labor unions an' employers' associations, an' strikes', an' hard times, an' huntin' for jobs, an' all the rest.
Things wasn't like that in the old days. Everybody farmed, an' shot their meat, an' got enough to eat, an' took care of their old foiks. But now it's all a mix-up that I can't understand.
Mebbe I'm a fool, I don't know. But, anyway, go ahead an' tell us about your mother."
"Well, you see, when she was only a young woman she and Captain Brown fell in love. He was a soldier then, before the war. And he was ordered East for the war when she was away nursing her sister Laura. And then came the news that he was killed at Shiloh. And she married a man who had loved her for years and years. He was a boy in the same wagon-train coming across the plains. She liked him, but she didn't love him. And afterwerd came the news that my father wasn't killed after all. So it made her very sad, but it did not spoil her life. She was a good mother end a good wife and all that, but she was always sad, and sweet, and gentle, and I think her voice was the most beautiful in the world."
"She was game, all right," Billy approved.
"And my father never married. He loved her all the time. I've got a lovely poem home that she wrote to him, It's just wonderful, and it sings like music. Well, long, long afterward her husband died, and then she and my father made their love marriage. They didn't get married until 1882, and she was pretty well along."
More she told him, as they stood hy the gate, and Saxon tried to think that the good-bye kiss was a trifle longer than just ordinary, "How about nine o'clock?" he queried across the gate. "Don't bother about lunch or anything. I'll fix all that up. You just be ready at nine."
