“My mother gave it to me. She was educated, and knew all kinds of words. She was always reading books, almost until she died. And she wrote lots and lots. I've got some of her poetry published in a San Jose newspaper long ago. The Saxons were a race of people—she told me all about them when I was a little girl. They were wild, like Indians, only they were white. And they had blue eyes, and yellow hair, and they were awful fighters.”
As she talked, Billy followed her solemnly, his eyes steadily turned on hers.
“Never heard of them,” he confessed. “Did they live anywhere around here?”
She laughed.
“No. They lived in England. They were the first English, and you know the Americans came from the English. We're Saxons, you an' me, an' Mary, an' Bert, and all the Americans that are real Americans, you know, and not Dagoes and Japs and such.”
“My folks lived in America a long time,” Billy said slowly, digesting the information she had given and relating himself to it. “Anyway, my mother's folks did. They crossed to Maine hundreds of years ago.”
“My father was 'State of Maine,” she broke in, with a little gurgle of joy. “And my mother was born in Ohio, or where Ohio is now. She used to call it the Great Western Reserve. What was your father?”
“Don't know.” Billy shrugged his shoulders. “He didn't know himself. Nobody ever knew, though he was American, all right, all right.”
“His name's regular old American,” Saxon suggested. “There's a big English general right now whose name is Roberts. I've read it in the papers.”
“But Roberts wasn't my father's name. He never knew what his name was. Roberts was the name of a gold-miner who adopted him. You see, it was this way. When they was Indian-fightin' up there with the Modoc Indians, a lot of the miners an' settlers took a hand. Roberts was captain of one outfit, and once, after a fight, they took a lot of prisoners—squaws, an' kids an' babies. An' one of the kids was my father. They figured he was about five years old. He didn't know nothin' but Indian.”