Her grit, her ability to turn off work that was such an amazement to others, were her mother's.

Just so had her mother been an amazement to her generation--her mother, the toy-like creature, the smallest and the youngest of the strapping pioneer brood, who nevertheless had mothered the brood.

Always it had been her wisdom that was sought, even by the brothers and sisters a dozen years her senior.

Daisy, it was, who had put her tiny foot down and commanded the removal from the fever flatlands of Colusa to the healthy mountains of Ventura; who had backed the savage old Indian-fighter of a father into a corner and fought the entire family that Vila might marry the man of her choice; who had flown in the face of the family and of community morality and demanded the divorce of Laura from her criminally weak husband; and who on the other hand, had held the branches of the family together when only misunderstanding and weak humanness threatened to drive them apart.
The peacemaker and the warrior! All the old tales trooped before Saxon's eyes.

They were sharp with detail, for she had visioned them many times, though their content was of things she had never seen.