Her vague, unreal existence continued. It seemed in some previous life-time that Billy had gone away, that another life-time would have to come before he returned. She still suffered from . Long nights passed in succession, during which she never closed her eyes. At other times she slept through long , waking and , scarcely able to open her heavy eyes, to move her weary limbs. The pressure of the iron band on her head never relaxed. She was poorly nourished. Nor had she a cent of money. She often went a whole day without eating. Once, seventy-two hours elapsed without food passing her lips. She dug in the , knocked the tiny from the rocks, and gathered mussels.  
And yet, when Bud Strothers came to see how she was getting along, she convinced him that all was well. One evening after work, Tom came, and forced two dollars upon her. He was terribly worried. He would like to help more, but Sarah was expecting another baby. There had been slack times in his trade because of the strikes in the other trades. He did not know what the country was coming to. And it was all so simple. All they had to do was see things in his way and vote the way he voted. Then everybody would get a square deal. Christ was a , he told her.
 
“Christ died two thousand years ago,” Saxon said.
 
“Well?” Tom , not her implication.
 
“Think,” she said, “think of all the men and women who died in those two thousand years, and socialism has not come yet. And in two thousand years more it may be as far away as ever. Tom, your socialism never did you any good. It is a dream.”
 
“It wouldn't be if—” he began with a flash of .
 
“If they believed as you do. Only they don't. You don't succeed in making them.”
 
“But we are increasing every year,” he argued.
 
“Two thousand years is an long time,” she said quietly.
 
Her brother's tired face saddened as he . Then he sighed:
 
“Well, Saxon, if it's a dream, it is a good dream.”
 
“I don't want to dream,” was her reply. “I want things real. I want them now.”
 
And before her fancy passed the generations of the stupid lowly, the Billys and Saxons, the Berts and Marys, the Toms and Sarahs. And to what end? The salt and the grave. Mercedes was a hard and wicked woman, but Mercedes was right. The stupid must always be under the heels of the clever ones. Only she, Saxon, daughter of Daisy who had written wonderful poems and of a soldier-father on a roan war-horse, daughter of the strong generations who had won half a world from wild nature and the Indian—no, she was not stupid. It was as if she suffered false . There was some mistake. She would find the way out.
 
With the two dollars she bought a sack of flour and half a sack of potatoes. This relieved the monotony of her clams and mussels. Like the Italian and women, she gathered driftwood and carried it home, though always she did it with shamed pride, her arrival so that it would be after dark. One day, on the mud-flat side of the Rock Wall, an Italian fishing boat hauled up on the sand dredged from the channel. From the top of the wall Saxon watched the men grouped about the brazier, eating crusty Italian bread and a of meat and vegetables, washed down with long of thin red wine. She envied them their freedom that advertised itself in the of their meal, in the tones of their and laughter, in the very boat itself that was not tied always to one place and that carried them wherever they willed. , they dragged a seine across the mud-flats and up on the sand, selecting for themselves only the larger kinds of fish. Many thousands of small fish, like , they left dying on the sand when they sailed away. Saxon got a sackful of the fish, and was compelled to make two trips in order to carry them home, where she salted them down in a wooden washtub.
 
Her of consciousness continued. The strangest thing she did while in such condition was on Sandy Beach. There she discovered herself, one windy afternoon, lying in a hole she had dug, with sacks for blankets. She had even roofed the hole in rough fashion by means of drift wood and marsh grass. On top of the grass she had piled sand.
 
Another time she came to herself walking across the , a bundle of driftwood, tied with bale-rope, on her shoulder. Charley Long was walking beside her. She could see his face in the starlight. She wondered dully how long he had been talking, what he had said. Then she was curious to hear what he was saying. She was not afraid, despite his strength, his wicked nature, and the loneliness and darkness of the marsh.
 
“It's a shame for a girl like you to have to do this,” he was saying, in repetition of what he had already urged. “Come on an' say the word, Saxon. Come on an' say the word.”
 
Saxon stopped and quietly faced him.
 
“Listen, Charley Long. Billy's only doing thirty days, and his time is almost up. When he gets out your life won't be worth a pinch of salt if I tell him you've been bothering me. Now listen. If you go right now away from here, and stay away, I won't tell him. That's all I've got to say.”
 
The big blacksmith stood in indecision, his face pathetic in its fierce , his hands making unconscious, clutching .
 
“Why, you little, small thing,” he said , “I could break you in one hand. I could—why, I could do anything I wanted. I don't want to hurt you, Saxon. You know that. Just say the word—”
 
“I've said the only word I'm going to say.”
 
“God!” he muttered in involuntary . “You ain't afraid. You ain't afraid.”
 
They faced each other for long silent minutes.
 
“Why ain't you afraid?” he demanded at last, after peering into the surrounding darkness as if searching for her hidden allies.
 
“Because I married a man,” Saxon said . “And now you'd better go.”
 
When he had gone she shifted the load of wood to her other shoulder and started on, in her breast a quiet thrill of pride in Billy. Though behind prison bars, still she leaned against his strength. The naming of him was sufficient to drive away a like Charley Long.
 
On the day that Otto Frank was hanged she remained indoors. The evening papers published the account. There had been no . In Sacramento was a railroad Governor who might reprieve or even pardon bank-wreckers and grafters, but who dared not lift his finger for a workingman. All this was the talk of the neighborhood. It had been Billy's talk. It had been Bert's talk.
 
The next day Saxon started out the Rock Wall, and the specter of Otto Frank walked by her side. And with him was a dimmer, specter that she recognized as Billy. Was he, too, to tread his way to Otto Frank's dark end? Surely so, if the blood and strike continued. He was a fighter. He felt he was right in fighting. It was easy to kill a man. Even if he did not intend it, some time, when he was slugging a scab, the scab would fracture his on a stone or a cement sidewalk. And then Billy would hang. That was why Otto Frank hanged. He had not intended to kill Henderson. It was only by accident that Henderson's skull was fractured. Yet Otto Frank had been hanged for it just the same.
 
She her hands and wept loudly as she stumbled among the windy rocks. The hours passed, and she was lost to herself and her grief. When she came to she found herself on the far end of the wall where it into the bay between the Oakland and Alameda . But she could see no wall. It was the time of the full moon, and the unusual high tide covered the rocks. She was knee deep in the water, and about her knees swam scores of big rock rats, and fighting, to climb upon her out of the flood. She screamed with fright and horror, and kicked at them. Some dived and swam away under water; others circled about her at a distance; and one big fellow laid his teeth into her shoe. Him she stepped on and crushed with her free foot. By this time, though still trembling, she was able coolly to consider the situation. She to a stick of driftwood a few feet away, and with this quickly cleared a space about herself.
 
A grinning small boy, in a small, bright-painted and half-decked skiff, sailed close in to the wall and let go his sheet to spill the wind. “Want to get aboard?” he called.
 
“Yes,” she answered. “There are thousands of big rats here. I'm afraid of them.”
 
He nodded, ran close in, spilled the wind from his sail, the boat's way carrying it gently to her.
 
“Shove out its bow,” he commanded. “That's right. I don't want to break my centerboard.... An' then jump aboard in the stern—quick!—alongside of me.”
 
She obeyed, stepping in lightly beside him. He held the tiller up with his elbow, pulled in on the sheet, and as the sail filled the boat sprang away over the water.
 
“You know boats,” the boy said approvingly.
 
He was a slender, almost lad, of twelve or thirteen years, though healthy enough, with sunburned face and large gray eyes that were clear and wistful.
 
Despite his possession of the pretty boat, Saxon was quick to sense that he was one of them, a child of the people.
 
“First boat I was ever in, except ferryboats,” Saxon laughed.
 
He looked at her keenly. “Well, you take to it like a duck to water is all I can say about it. Where d'ye want me to land you?”
 
“Anywhere.”
 
He opened his mouth to speak, gave her another long look, considered for a space, then asked suddenly: “Got plenty of time?”
 
She nodded.
 
“All day?”
 
Again she nodded.
 
“Say—I'll tell you, I'm goin' out on this to Goat Island for rockcod, an' I'll come in on the flood this evening. I got plenty of lines an' bait. Want to come along? We can both fish. And what you catch you can have.”
 
Saxon hesitated. The freedom and motion of the small boat appealed to her. Like the ships she had envied, it was outbound.
 
“Maybe you'll drown me,” she parleyed.
 
The boy threw back his head with pride.
 
“I guess I've been sailin' many a long day by myself, an' I ain't drowned yet.”
 
“All right,” she consented. “Though remember, I don't know anything about boats.”
 
“Aw, that's all right.—Now I'm goin' to go about. When I say 'Hard a-lee!' like that, you duck your head so the boom don't hit you, an' shift over to the other side.”
 
He executed the , Saxon obeyed, and found herself sitting beside him on the opposite side of the boat, while the boat itself, on the other , was heading toward Long where the coal bunkers were. She was with admiration, the more so because the mechanics of boat-sailing was to her a complex and mysterious thing.
 
“Where did you learn it all?” she inquired.
 
“Taught myself, just naturally taught myself. I liked it, you see, an' what a fellow likes he's likeliest to do. This is my second boat. My first didn't have a centerboard. I bought it for two dollars an' learned a lot, though it never stopped leaking. What d 'ye think I paid for this one? It's worth twenty-five dollars right now. What d 'ye think I paid for it?”
 
“I give up,” Saxon said. “How much?”
 
“Six dollars. Think of it! A boat like this! Of course I done a lot of work, an' the sail cost two dollars, the one forty, an' the paint one seventy-five. But just the same eleven dollars and fifteen cents is a real bargain. It took me a long time saving for it, though. I carry papers morning and evening—there's a boy taking my route for me this afternoon—I give 'm ten cents, an' all the extras he sells is his; and I'd a-got the boat sooner only I had to pay for my shorthand lessons. My mother wants me to become a court reporter. They get sometimes as much as twenty doll............