At one end of the cemetery stood a large wooden plaque on which she had carved the Constitution of Pamplin. Many times had her mother explained the meaning of the Constitution to Lauria, when Lauria was a little girl and still intruding on her mother's privacy. "The people who colonized Pamplin left Earth many years ago because there they always had to sacrifice some of their individual rights to some government," her mother had said. "There are many kinds of governments, but all of them try to regulate people. And to regulate people, they have to invade people's privacy. "The people of Pamplin came to this world because we don't want any government. We believe that every man and woman should have his individual right to do as he pleases, without other people bothering him." "But what does No. 4 mean, Mother?" Lauria had asked. "'_Only the brave deserve the fair?_'" "That means," replied her mother, for Lauria was fourteen and deserved to know these things, "that a woman on Pamplin is not subservient to the whims of men. No man may approach her and take her in his arms unless he has fought his way through the defenses of her home. Then they may agree to share the home, if they wish, but no woman of any character will permit a man to do this until he has proved his valor by fighting his way to her." "Then my father must have been a brave man, wasn't he, Mother?" "Yes, he was, my dear," said her mother, smiling tenderly. "He was very persuasive, too." Lauria never saw her father, and no other man invaded the privacy of her mother's home while she lived there. Two men tried, and Lauria remembered the tense stirrings about the darkened house in the dead of night, the flash and roar of the guns, and her frightened glimpses of the men her mother had shot down as they tried to break in. Her father must have been very courageous, Lauria thought. She constructed a handsome picture of her father in her mind, and dreamed of the day a handsome man like he would conquer her, when she lived in her own home. Lauria's mother had some property on which she wanted Lauria to build a house, but Lauria was impatient. Even though her mother would hire men from town, Lauria would have to do much of the work herself and it would take years. So at sixteen, Lauria got her a house, ready-built. She crept past the defenses of one of the best homes in the area. She broke into the house at night and killed the defender, a tired old man, in a blazing gun battle. The house became her home, and she improved its defenses. Her ownership of the house, and her manner of taking it, gave her an immediate social standing far above that of her mother. She knew that she was envied: the bright-haired, beautiful young woman who held the ramparts of the big house and challenged all comers to conquer her.