Saxon clapped her hands, and her eyes sparkled: “He'd been captured on an Indian raid!”
“That's the way they figured it,” Billy nodded. “They recollected a wagon-train of Oregon settlers that'd been killed by the Modocs four years before. Roberts adopted him, and that's why I don't know his real name. But you can bank on it, he crossed the plains just the same.”
“So did my father,” Saxon said proudly.
“An' my mother, too,” Billy added, pride touching his own voice. “Anyway, she came pretty close to crossin' the plains, because she was born in a wagon on the River Platte on the way out.”
“My mother, too,” said Saxon. “She was eight years old, an' she walked most of the way after the oxen began to give out.”
Billy thrust out his hand.
“Put her there, kid,” he said. “We're just like old friends, what with the same kind of folks behind us.”
With shining eyes, Saxon extended her hand to his, and gravely they shook.
“Isn't it wonderful?” she murmured. “We're both old American stock. And if you aren't a Saxon there never was one—your hair, your eyes, your skin, everything. And you're a fighter, too.”
“I guess all our old folks was fighters when it comes to that. It come natural to 'em, an' dog-gone it, they just had to fight or they'd never come through.”