“All right,” Billy conceded. “Hazel an' Hattie come back to me; but you can pay me rent for the time you did use 'em.”
“If you make me, I'll charge you board,” she threatened.
“An' if you charge me board, I'll charge you interest for the money I've stuck into this shebang.”
“You can't,” Saxon laughed. “It's community property.”
He grunted spasmodically, as if the breath had been knocked out of him.
“Straight on the solar plexus,” he said, “an' me down for the count. But say, them's sweet words, ain't they—community property.” He rolled them over and off his tongue with keen relish. “An' when we got married the top of our ambition was a steady job an' some rags an' sticks of furniture all paid up an' half-worn out. We wouldn't have had any community property only for you.”
“What nonsense! What could I have done by myself? You know very well that you earned all the money that started us here. You paid the wages of Gow Yum and Chan Chi, and old Hughie, and Mrs. Paul, and—why, you've done it all.”
She drew her two hands caressingly across his shoulders and down along his great biceps muscles.
“That's what did it, Billy.”
“Aw hell! It's your head that done it. What was my muscles good for with no head to run 'em,—sluggin' scabs, beatin' up lodgers, an' crookin' the elbow over a bar. The only sensible thing my head ever done was when it run me into you. Honest to God, Saxon, you've been the makin' of me.”