“Say, this country air gives some appetite,” he mumbled, as he sank his teeth into his fifth bread-and-meat sandwich. “I could eat a horse, an' drown his head off in coffee afterward.”
Saxon's mind had reverted to all the young lineman had told her, and she completed a sort of general resume of the information. “My!” she exclaimed, “but we've learned a lot!”
“An' we've sure learned one thing,” Billy said. “An' that is that this is no place for us, with land a thousan' an acre an' only twenty dollars in our pockets.”
“Oh, we're not going to stop here,” she hastened to say.
“But just the same it's the Portuguese that gave it its price, and they make things go on it—send their children to school... and have them; and, as you said yourself, they're as fat as butterballs.”
“An' I take my hat off to them,” Billy responded.
“But all the same, I'd sooner have forty acres at a hundred an acre than four at a thousan' an acre. Somehow, you know, I'd be scared stiff on four acres—scared of fallin' off, you know.”
She was in full sympathy with him. In her heart of hearts the forty acres tugged much the harder. In her way, allowing for the difference of a generation, her desire for spaciousness was as strong as her Uncle Will's.
“Well, we're not going to stop here,” she assured Billy. “We're going in, not for forty acres, but for a hundred and sixty acres free from the government.”
“An' I guess the government owes it to us for what our fathers an' mothers done. I tell you, Saxon, when a woman walks across the plains like your mother done, an' a man an' wife gets massacred by the Indians like my grandfather an' mother done, the government does owe them something.”