The Valley of the Moon | Page 5

of it was
woven into her earliest recollections. She knew it had crossed the plains
with her people in a prairie schooner. It was of solid mahogany. One
end was cracked and dented from the capsize of the wagon in Rock
Canyon. A bullet-hole, plugged, in the face of the top drawer, told of
the fight with the Indians at Little Meadow. Of these happenings her
mother had told her; also had she told that the chest had come with the
family originally from England in a day even earlier than the day on
which George Washington was born.
Above the chest of drawers, on the wall, hung a small looking-glass.
Thrust under the molding were photographs of young men and women,
and of picnic groups wherein the young men, with hats rakishly on the
backs of their heads, encircled the girls with their arms. Farther along
on the wall were a colored calendar and numerous colored
advertisements and sketches torn out of magazines. Most of these
sketches were of horses. From the gas-fixture hung a tangled bunch of
well-scribbled dance programs.
Saxon started to take off her hat, but suddenly sat down on the bed. She
sobbed softly, with considered repression, but the weak-latched door
swung noiselessly open, and she was startled by her sister-in-law's
voice.
"NOW what's the matter with you? If you didn't like them beans--"
"No, no," Saxon explained hurriedly. "I'm just tired, that's all, and my
feet hurt. I wasn't hungry, Sarah. I'm just beat out."
"If you took care of this house," came the retort, "an' cooked an' baked,
an' washed, an' put up with what I put up, you'd have something to be
beat out about. You've got a snap, you have. But just wait." Sarah broke
off to cackle gloatingly. "Just wait, that's all, an' you'll be fool enough
to get married some day, like me, an' then you'll get yours--an' it'll be

brats, an' brats, an' brats, an' no more dancin', an' silk stockin's, an' three
pairs of shoes at one time. You've got a cinch-nobody to think of but
your own precious self--an' a lot of young hoodlums makin' eyes at you
an' tellin' you how beautiful your eyes are. Huh! Some fine day you'll
tie up to one of 'em, an' then, mebbe, on occasion, you'll wear black
eyes for a change."
"Don't say that, Sarah," Saxon protested. "My brother never laid hands
on you. You know that."
"No more he didn't. He never had the gumption. Just the same, he's
better stock than that tough crowd you run with, if he can't make a livin'
an' keep his wife in three pairs of shoes. Just the same he's oodles
better'n your bunch of hoodlums that no decent woman'd wipe her one
pair of shoes on. How you've missed trouble this long is beyond me.
Mebbe the younger generation is wiser in such thins--I don't know. But
I do know that a young woman that has three pairs of shoes ain't
thinkin' of anything but her own enjoyment, an' she's goin' to get hers, I
can tell her that much. When I was a girl there wasn't such doin's. My
mother'd taken the hide off me if I done the things you do. An' she was
right, just as everything in the world is wrong now. Look at your
brother, a-runnin' around to socialist meetin's, an' chewin' hot air, an'
diggin' up extra strike dues to the union that means so much bread out
of the mouths of his children, instead of makin' good with his bosses.
Why, the dues he pays would keep me in seventeen pairs of shoes if I
was nannygoat enough to want 'em. Some day, mark my words, he'll
get his time, an' then what'll we do? What'll I do, with five mouths to
feed an' nothin' comin' in?"
She stopped, out of breath but seething with the tirade yet to come.
"Oh, Sarah, please won't you shut the door?" Saxon pleaded.
The door slammed violently, and Saxon, ere she fell to crying again,
could hear her sister-in-law lumbering about the kitchen and talking
loudly to herself.
CHAPTER II

Each bought her own ticket at the entrance to Weasel Park. And each,
as she laid her half-dollar down, was distinctly aware of how many
pieces of fancy starch were represented by the coin. It was too early for
the crowd, but bricklayers and their families, laden with huge
lunch-baskets and armfuls of babies, were already going in--a healthy,
husky race of workmen, well-paid and robustly fed. And with them,
here and there, undisguised by their decent American clothing, smaller
in bulk and stature, weazened not alone by age but by the pinch of lean
years and early hardship, were grandfathers and mothers who had
patently first