The Lions of the Lord by Harry Leon WilsonA Tale of the Old West (page 4)

Lieutenant-Colonel Cooke of the Second Dragoons, with whom travelled the newly appointed governor, was another to suffer. At Fort Laramie so many of his animals had dropped out that numbers of his men were dismounted, and the ambulances used to carry grain. Night after night they huddled at the base of cliffs in the fearful eddies of the snow, and heard above the blast the piteous cries of their famished and freezing stock. Day after day they pushed against the keen blades of the wind, toiling through frozen clouds and stinging ice blasts. The last thirty-five miles to Fort Bridger had required fifteen days, and at one camp on Black’s Fork, which they called the “camp of Death,” five hundred animals perished in a night.

Nor did the hardships of the troops end when they had all reached what was to be their winter quarters. Still a hundred and fifteen miles from the City of the Saints, they were poorly housed against the bitter cold, poorly fed, and insufficiently clothed, for the burning of the trains by the Lord’s hosts had reduced all supplies.

Reports of this distress were duly carried to Brigham and published to the Saints. Their soldiers had made good their resolve to prevent the Federal army from passing the Wasatch Mountains. Aggressive operations ceased for the winter, and the greater part of the militia returned to their homes. A small outpost of fifty men under the command of Major Joel Rae–who had earnestly requested this assignment–was left to guard the narrows of Echo Canon and to keep watch over the enemy during the winter. This officer was now persuaded that the Lord’s hand was with them. For the enemy had been wasted away even by the elements from the time he had crossed the forbidden line.

In Salt Lake City that winter, the same opinion prevailed. They were henceforth to be the free and independent State of Deseret.

“Do you want to know,” asked Brigham, in the tabernacle, “what is to be done with the enemy now on our borders? As soon as they start to come into our settlements, let sleep depart from their eyes until they sleep in death! Men shall be secreted along the route and shall waste them away in the name of the God of Battles. The United States will have to make peace with us. Never again shall we make peace with them.”

And they sang with fervour:–

“By the mountains our Zion’s surrounded, Her warriors are noble and brave;
And their faith on Jehovah is founded, Whose power is mighty to save.
Opposed by a proud, boasting nation, Their numbers compared may be few;
But their Ruler is known through creation, And they’ll always be faithful and true.”

CHAPTER XX.

_How the Lion of the Lord Roared Soft_

But with the coming of spring some fever that had burned in the blood of the Saints from high to low was felt to be losing its heat. They had held the Gentile army at bay during the winter–with the winter’s help. But spring was now melting the snows. Reports from Washington, moreover, indicated that a perverse generation in the States had declined to accept the decrees of Israel’s God without further proofs of their authenticity.

With a view to determining this issue, Congress had voted more money for troops. Three thousand men were to march to the reinforcement of the army of Johnston on Black’s Fork; forty-five hundred wagons were to transport their supplies; and fifty thousand oxen and four thousand mules were to pull these wagons. War, in short, was to be waged upon this Israel hidden in the chamber of the mountains. To Major Rae, watching on the outposts of Zion from behind the icy ramparts of Echo Canon, the news was welcome, even enlivening. The more glory there would be in that ultimate triumph which the Lord was about to secure for them.

In Brigham and the other leaders, however, this report induced deep thought. And finally, on a day, they let it be known that there could no longer be any thought of actual war with the armies of the Gentile. Joel Rae in Echo Canon was incredulous. There must be battle given. The Lord would make them prevail; the living God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob, would hold them up. And battle must be given for another reason, though he hardly dared let that reason be plain to himself. For only by continuing the war, only by giving actual battle to armed soldiers, by fighting to the end if need be–only so could that day in Mountain Meadows be made to appear as anything but–he shuddered and could not name it. Even if actual war were to be fought on and on for years, he believed that day could hardly be justified; but at least it could be made in years of fighting to stand less horribly high and solitary. They must fight, he thought, even if it were to lose all. But the Lord would stay them. How much more wicked and perverse, then, to reject the privilege!

When he heard that the new governor, who had been in the snow with Johnston’s army all winter, was to enter Salt Lake City and take his office–a Gentile officer to sit on the throne of Brigham–he felt that the Ark of the Covenant had been thrown down. “Let us not,” he implored Brigham in a letter sent him from Echo Canon, “be again dragooned into servile obedience to any one less than the Christ of God!”

But Brigham’s reply was an order to pass the new governor through Echo Canon. According to the terms of this order he was escorted through at night, in a manner to convince him that he was passing between the lines of a mighty and far-flung host. Fires were kindled along the heights and the small force attending him was cunningly distributed and duplicated, a few of its numbers going ahead from time to time, halting the rest of the party and demanding the countersign.

Joel Rae found himself believing that he could now have been a fiercer Lion of the Lord than Brigham was; for he would have fought, while Brigham was stooping to petty strategies–as if God were needing to rely upon deceits.

He was only a little appeased when, on going to Salt Lake City, he learned Brigham’s intentions more fully. The new governor had been installed; but the army of Johnston was to turn back. This was Brigham’s first promise. Soon, however, this was modified. The government, it appeared, was bent upon quartering its troops in the valley; and Zion, therefore, would be again led into the wilderness. The earlier promise was repeated–and the earlier threat–to the peace commissioners now sent on from Washington.

“We are willing those troops should come into our country, but not stay in our city. They may pass through if need be, but must not be quartered within forty miles of us. And if they come here to disturb this people, before they reach here this city will be in ashes; every house and tree and shrub and blade of grass will be destroyed. Here are twenty years’ gathering, but it will all burn. You will have won back the wilderness, barren again as on the day we entered it, but you will not have conquered the people. Our wives and children will go to the canons and take shelter in the mountains, while their husbands and sons will fight you. You will be without fuel, without subsistence for yourselves or forage for your animals. You will be in a strange land, while we know every foot of it. We will haunt and harass you and pick you off by day and by night, and, as God lives, we will waste your army away.”

This was hopeful. Here at least was another chance to suffer persecution, and thus, in a measure, atone for any monstrous wrong they might have done. He hoped the soldiers would come despoiling, plundering, thus compelling them to use the torch and to flee. Another forced exodus would help to drive certain memories from his mind and silence the cries that were now beginning to ring in his ears.

Obedient to priestly counsel, the Saints declined, in the language of Brigham, “to trust again in Punic faith.” In April they began to move south, starting from the settlements on the north. During that and the two succeeding months thirty thousand of them left their homes. They took only their wagons, bedding, and provisions, leaving their other possessions to the mercy of the expected despoiler. Before locking the doors of their houses for the last time, they strewed shavings, straw, and other combustibles through the rooms so that the work of firing the city could be done quickly. A score of men were left behind to apply the torch the moment it became necessary,–should a gate be swung open or a latch lifted by hostile hands. Their homes and fields and orchards might be given back to the desert from which they had been won; but never to the Gentile invaders.

To the south the wagons crept, day after day, to some other unknown desert which their prophet should choose, and where, if the Lord willed, they would again charm orchards and gardens and green fields from the gray, parched barrens.

Late in June the army of Johnston descended Emigration Canon, passed through the echoing streets of the all but deserted city and camped on the River Jordan. But, to the deep despair of one observer, these invaders committed no depredation or overt act. After resting inoffensively two days on the Jordan, they marched forty miles south to Cedar Valley, where Camp Floyd was established.

Thus, no one fully comprehending how it had come about, peace was seen suddenly to have been restored. The people, from Brigham down, had been offered a free pardon for all past treasons and seditions if they would return to their allegiance to the Federal government; the new officers of the Territory were installed, sons of perdition in the seats of the Lord’s mighty; and sermons of wrath against Uncle Sam ceased for the moment to resound in the tabernacle. Early in July, Brigham ordered the people to return to their homes. They had offered these as a sacrifice, even as Abraham had offered Isaac, and the Lord had caught them a timely ram in the thicket.

In the midst of the general rejoicing, Joel Rae was overwhelmed with humiliation and despair. He was ashamed for having once wished to be another Lion of the Lord. It was a poor way to find favour with God, he thought,–this refusing battle when it had been all but forced upon them. It was plain, however, that the Lord meant to try them further,–plain, too, that in His inscrutable wisdom He had postponed the destruction of the wicked nation to the east of them.

He longed again to rise before the people and call them to repentance and to action. Once he would have done so, but now an evil shadow lay upon him. Intuitively he knew that his words would no longer come with power. Some virtue had gone out of him. And with this loss of confidence in himself came again a desire to be away from the crowded center.

Off to the south was the desert. There he could be alone; there face God and his own conscience and have his inmost soul declare the truth about himself. In his sadness he would have liked to lead the people with him, lead them away from some evil, some falsity that had crept in about them; he knew not what it was nor how it had come, but Zion had been defiled. Something was gone from the Church, something from Brigham, something from himself,–something, it almost seemed, even from the God of Israel. When the summer waned, his plan was formed to go to one of the southern settlements to live. Brigham had approved. The Church needed new blood there.

He rode out of the city one early morning in September, facing to the south over the rolling valley that lay between the hills now flaunting their first autumn colours. He was in haste to go, yet fearful of what he should meet there.

A little out of the city he passed a man from the south, huddled high on the seat under the bow of his wagon-cover, who sang as he went one of the songs that had been so popular the winter before:–

“Old squaw-killer Harney is on the way The Mormon people for to slay.
Now if he comes, the truth I’ll tell, Our boys will drive him down to hell– Du dah, du dah, day!”

He smiled grimly as the belated echo of war came back to him.

CHAPTER XXI.

_The Blood on the Page_

Along the level lane between the mountain ranges he went, a lane that runs almost from Bear Creek on the north to the Colorado on the south, with a width of twenty miles or so. But for Joel Rae it became a ride down the valley of lost illusions. Some saving grace of faith was gone from the people. He passed through sturdy little settlements, bowered in gardens and orchards, and girded about by now fertile acres where once had been the bare, gray desert. Slowly, mile by mile, the Saints had pushed down the valley, battling with the Indians and the elements for every acre of land they gained. Yet it seemed to him now that they had achieved but a mere Godless prosperity. They had worked a miracle of abundance in the desert–but of what avail? For the soul of their faith was gone. He felt or heard the proof of it on every hand.

Through Battle Creek, Provo, and Springville he went; through Spanish Fork, Payson, Salt Creek, and Fillmore. He stopped to preach at each place, but he did it perfunctorily, and with shame for himself in his secret heart. Some impalpable essence of spirituality was gone from himself and from the people. He felt himself wickedly agreeing with a pessimistic elder at Fillmore, who remarked: “I tell you what, Brother Rae, it seems like when the Book of Mormon goes again’ the Constitution of the United States, there’s sure to be hell to pay, and the Saints allus has to pay it.” He could not tell the man in words of fire, as once he would have done, that they had been punished for lack of faith.

Another told him it was madness to have thought they could “whip” the United States. “Why,” said this one, “they’s more soldiers back there east of the Missouri than there is fiddlers in hell!” By the orthodox teachings of the time, the good man of Israel had thus indicated an overwhelming host.

He passed sadly on. They would not understand that they had laid by and forgotten their impenetrable armour of faith.

Between Beaver and Paragonah that day, toiling intently along the dusty road in the full blaze of the August sun, he met a woman,–a tall, strong creature with a broad, kind face, burned and seamed and hardened by life in the open. Yet it was a face that appealed to him by its look of simple, trusting earnestness. Her dress was of stout, gray homespun, her shoes were coarse and heavy, and she was bareheaded, her gray, straggling hair half caught into a clumsy knot at the back of her head. She turned out to pass him without looking up, but he stopped his horse and dismounted before her. It seemed to him that here was one whose faith was still fresh, and to such a one he needed to talk. He called to her:

“You need something on your head; you are burned.”

She looked up, absently at first, as if neither seeing nor hearing him. Then intelligence came into her eyes.

“You mean my Timothy needs something on his head–poor man! You see he broke out of the house last night, because the Bishop told him I was to take another husband. Cruel! Oh, so cruel!–the poor foolish man, he believed it, and he cared so for me. He thought I was bringing home a new man with me–a new wedding for time and eternity, to build myself up in the Kingdom–a new wedding night–with him sitting off, cold and neglected. But something burst in his head. It made a roar like the mill at Cedar Creek when it grinds the corn–just like that. So he went out into the cold night–it was sleeting–thinking I’d never miss him, you see, me being fondled and made over by the new man–wouldn’t miss him till morning.” A scowl of indignation darkened her face for an instant, and she paused, looking off toward the distant hills.

“But that was all a lie, a mean lie! I don’t see how he could have believed it. I think he couldn’t have been right up here–” she pointed to her head.

“But of course I followed him, and I’ve been following him all day. He must have got quite a start of me–poor dear–how could he think I’d break his heart? But I’ll have him found by night. I must hurry, so good day, sir!” She curtsied to him with a curious awkward sort of grace. He stopped her again.

“Where will you sleep to-night?”

“In his arms, thank God!”

“But if you happen to miss him–you might not find him until to-morrow.”

A puzzled look crossed her face, and then came the shadow of a disquieting memory.

“Now you speak so, I remember that it wasn’t last night he left–it was the night before–no?–perhaps three or four nights. But not as much as a fortnight. I remember my little baby came the night he left. I was so mad to find him I suffered the mother-pains out in the cold rain–just a little dead baby–I could take no interest in it. And there has been a night or two since then, of course. Sleep?–oh, I’ll sleep some easy place where I can hear him if he passes–sometimes by the road, in a barn, in houses–they let me sleep where I like. I must hurry now. He’s waiting just over that hill ahead.”

He saw her ascend the rise with a new spring in her step. When she reached the top, he saw her pause and look from side to side below her, then start hopefully down toward the next hill.

A mile beyond, back of a great cloud of dust, He found a drove of cattle, and back of these, hot and voiceful, came the good Bishop Wright. He described the woman he had just met, and inquired if the Bishop knew her.

The Wild Ram of the Mountain mopped his dusty, damp brow, took an easier seat in his saddle, and fanned himself. “Oh, yes, that’s the first wife of Elder Tench. When he took his second, eight or ten years ago, something went wrong with this one in her head. She left the house the same night, and she’s been on the go ever since. She don’t do any harm, jest tramps back and forth between Paragonah and Parowan and Summit and Cedar City. I always _have_ said that women is the contrary half of the human race and man is the sanifying half!”

The cattle were again in motion, and the Bishop after them with strong cries of correction and exhortation.

Toward evening Joel Rae entered Paragonah, a loose group of log houses amid outlying fields, now shorn and yellow. Along the street in front of him many children followed and jeered in the wake of a man who slouched some distance ahead of them. As Joel came nearer, one boy, bolder than the others, ran forward and tugged sharply at the victim’s ragged gray coat. At this he turned upon his pursuers, and Joel Rae saw his face,–the face of an imbecile, with unsteady eyes and weakly drooping jaw. He raised his hand threateningly at his tormentors, and screamed at them in rage. Then, as they fell back, he chuckled to himself. As Joel passed him, he was still looking back at the group of children now jeering him from a safe distance, his eyes bright for the moment, and his face lighted with a weak, loose-lipped smile.

“Who is that fellow, Bishop?” he asked of his host for the night, a few moments later, when he dismounted in front of the cabin. The Bishop shaded his eyes with his hand and peered up the road at the shambling figure once more moving ahead of the tormenting children.

“That? Oh, that’s only Tom Potwin. You heard about him, I guess. No? Well, he’s a simple–been so four years now. Don’t you recollect? He’s the lad over at Manti who wouldn’t give up the girl Bishop Warren Snow wanted. The priesthood tried every way to make him; they counselled him, and that didn’t do; then they ordered him away on mission, but he wouldn’t go; and then they counselled the girl, but she was stubborn too. The Bishop saw there wasn’t any other way, so he had him called to a meeting at the schoolhouse one night. As soon as he got there, the lights was blowed out, and–well, it was unfortunate, but this boy’s been kind of an idiot ever since.”

“Unfortunate! It was awful!”

“Not so awful as refusing to obey counsel.”

“What became of the girl?”

“Oh, she saw it wasn’t no use trying to go against the Lord, so she married the Bishop. He said at the time that he knew she’d bring him bad luck–she being his thirteenth–and she did, she was that hifalutin. He had to put her away about a year ago, and I hear she’s living in a dugout somewhere the other side of Cedar City, a-starving to death they tell me, but for what the neighbours bring her. I never did see why the Bishop was so took with her. You could see she’d never make a worker, and good looks go mighty fast.”

He dreamed that night that the foundations of the great temple they were building had crumbled. And when he brought new stones to replace the old, these too fell away to dust in his hands.

The next evening he reached Cedar City. Memories of this locality began to crowd back upon him with torturing clearness; especially of the morning he had left Hamblin’s ranch. As he mounted his horse two of the children saved from the wagon-train had stood near him,–a boy of seven and another a little older, the one who had fought so viciously with him when he was separated from the little girl. He remembered that the younger of the two boys had forgotten all but the first of his name. He had told them that it was John Calvin–something; he could not remember what, so great had been his fright; the people at the ranch, because of his forlorn appearance, had thereupon named him John Calvin Sorrow.

These two boys had watched him closely as he mounted his horse, and the older one had called to him, “When I get to be a man, I’m coming back with a gun and kill you till you are dead yourself,” and the other, little John Calvin Sorrow, had clenched his fists and echoed the threat, “We’ll come back here and kill you! Mormons is worse’n Indians!”

He had ridden quickly away, not noting that some of the men standing by had looked sharply at the boys and then significantly at one another. One of those who had been present, whom he now met, told him of these two boys.

“You see, Elder, the orders from headquarters was to save only them that was too young to give evidence in a court. But these two was very forward and knowing. They shouldn’t have been kept in the first place. So two men–no need of naming names–took both of them out one night. They got along all right with the little one, the one they called John Calvin Sorrow–only the little cuss kicked and scrambled so that we both had to see to him for a minute, and when we was ready for the other, there he was at least ten rods away, a-legging it into the scrub oak. Well, they looked and looked and hunted around till daybreak, but he’d got away all right, the moon going under a cloud. They tracked him quite a ways when it come light, till his tracks run into the trail of a big band of Navajos that had been up north trading ponies and was going back south. He was the one that talked so much about you, but you needn’t ever have any fear of his talking any more. He’d be done for one way or another.”

For the first time in his life that night, he was afraid to pray,–afraid even to give thanks that others were sleeping in the room with him so that he could hear their breathing and know that he was not alone.

He was up betimes to press on to the south, again afraid to pray, and dreading what was still in store for him. For sooner or later he would have to be alone in the night. Thus far since that day in the Meadows he had slept near others, whether in cabins or in camp, in some freighter’s wagon or bivouacking in the snows of Echo Canon. Each night he had been conscious, at certain terrible moments of awakening, that others were near him. He heard their breathing, or in the silence a fire’s light had shown him a sleeping face, the lines of a form, or an arm tossed out. What would happen on the night he found himself alone, he knew not–death, or the loss of reason. He knew what the torture would be,–the shrieks of women in deadly terror, the shrill cries of children, the low, tense curses of men, the rattle of shots, the yells of Indians, the heavy, sickening smell of blood, the still forms fallen in strange positions of ease, the livid faces distorted to grins. He had not been able to keep the sounds from his ears, but thus far the things themselves had stayed behind him, moving always, crawling, writhing, even stepping furtively close at his back, so that he could feel their breath on his neck. When the time came that these should move around in front of him, he thought it would have to be the end. They would go before him, a wild, bleeding, raving procession, until they tore his heart from his breast. One sight he feared most of all,–a bronzed arm with a wide silver bracelet at the wrist, the hand clutching and waving before him heavy strands of long, yellow hair with a gory patch at the end,–living hair that writhed and undulated to catch the light, coiling about the arm like a golden serpent.

His way lay through the Meadows, yet he hardly realised this until he was fairly on the ground in the midst of a thousand evil signs of the day. Here, a year after, were skulls and whitening bones, some in heaps, some scattered through the sage-brush where the wolves had left them. Many of the skulls were pierced with bullet-holes, shattered as by heavy blows, or cleft as with a sharp-edged weapon. Even more terrifying than these were certain traces caught here and there on the low scrub oaks along the way,–children’s sunbonnets; shreds of coarse lace, muslin, and calico; a child’s shoe, the tattered sleeve of a woman’s dress–all faded, dead, whipped by the wind.

He pressed through it all with set jaws, trying to keep his eyes fixed upon the ground beyond his horse’s head; but his ears were at the mercy of the cries that rang from every thicket.

Once out of it, he rode hard, for it must not come yet–his first night alone. By dusk he had reached the new settlement of Amalon, a little off the main road in a valley of the Pine Mountains. Here he sought the house where he had left the child. When he had picketed his horse he went in and had her brought to him,–a fresh little flower-like woman-child, with hair and eyes that told of her mother, with reminders of her mother’s ways as she stood before him, a waiting poise of the head, a lift of the chin. They looked at each other in the candle-light, the child standing by the woman who had brought her, looking up at him curiously, and he not daring to touch her or go nearer. She became uneasy and frightened at last, under his scrutiny, and when the woman would have held her from running away, began to cry, so that he gave the word to let her go. She ran quickly into the other room of the cabin, from which she called back with tears of indignation in her voice, “You’re not my papa–not my _real_ papa!”

When the people were asleep, he sat before the blaze in the big fireplace, on the hearth cleanly swept with its turkey-wing and buffalo-tail. There was to be one more night of his reprieve from solitude. The three women of the house and the man were sleeping around the room in bunks. The child’s bed had been placed near him on the floor after she slept, as he had asked it to be. He had no thought of sleep for himself. He was too intensely awake with apprehension. On the floor beside his chair was a little bundle the woman had brought him,–the bundle he had found loosened by her side, that day, with the trinkets scattered about and the limp-backed little Bible lying open where it had fallen.

He picked the bundle up and untied it, touching the contents timidly. He took up the Bible last, and as he did so a memory flooded back upon him that sickened him and left him trembling. It was the book he had given her on her seventeenth birthday, the one she had told him she was keeping when they parted that morning at Nauvoo. He knew the truth before he opened it at the yellowed fly-leaf and read in faded ink, “From Joel to Prudence on this day when she is seventeen years old–June 2d, 1843.”

In a daze of feeling he turned the pages, trying to clear his mind, glancing at the chapter headings as he turned,–“Abram is Justified by Faith,” “God Instructeth Isaac,” “Pharaoh’s Heart Is Hardened,” “The Laws of Murder,” “The Curses for Disobedience.” He turned rapidly and at last began to run the leaves from between his thumb and finger, and then, well over in the book something dark caught his eye. He turned the leaves back again to see what it was; but not until the book was opened flat before him and he held the page close to the light did he see what it was his eye had caught. A wash of blood was across the page.

He stared blankly at the reddish, dark stain, as if its spell had been hypnotic. Little by little he began to feel the horror of it, remembering how he picked the book up from where it had fallen before her. Slowly, but with relentless certainty, his mind cleared to what he saw.

Now for the first time he began to notice the words that showed dimly through the stain, began to read them, to puzzle them out, as if they were new to him:–

“But I say unto you which hear, Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you,

“Bless them that curse you, and pray for them which despitefully use you.

“And unto him that smiteth thee on the one cheek, offer also the other; and him that taketh away thy cloke forbid not to take thy coat also.

“Give to every man that asketh of thee; and of him that taketh away thy goods ask them not again.

“And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise.”

Again and again he read them. They were illumined with a strangely terrible meaning by the blood of her he had loved and sworn to keep himself clean for.

He could no longer fight off the truth. It was facing him now in all its nakedness, monstrous to obscenity, demanding its due measure from his own soul’s blood. He aroused himself, shivering, and looked out into the room where the shadows lay heavy, and from whence came the breathing of the sleepers. He picked up the now sputtering candle, set in its hole bored in a block of wood, and held it up for a last look at the little woman-child. He was full of an agony of wonder as he gazed, of piteous questioning why this should be as it was. The child stirred and flung one arm over her eyes as if to hide the light. He put out the candle and set it down. Then stooping over, he kissed the pillow beside the child’s head and stepped lightly to the door. He had come to the end of his subterfuges–he could no longer delay his punishment.

Outside the moon was shining, and his horse moved about restlessly. He put on the saddle and rode off to the south, galloping rapidly after he reached the highway. Off there was a kindly desert where a man could take in peace such punishment as his body could bear and his soul decree; and where that soul could then pass on in decent privacy to be judged by its Maker.

CHAPTER XXII.

_The Picture in the Sky_

If something of the peace of the night-silence came to him as he rode, he counted it only the peace of surrender and despair. He knew now that he had been cheated of all his great long-nursed hopes of some superior exaltation. Nor this only; for he had sinned unforgivably and incurred perdition. He who had fasted, prayed, and endured, waiting for his Witness, for the spreading of the heavens and the glory of the open vision, had overreached himself and was cast down.

When at last he slowed his horse to a walk, it was the spring of the day. The moon had gone, and over on his left a soft grayness began to show above the line of the hills. The light grew until it glowed with the fire of opals; through the tree-tops ran little stirs of wakefulness, and all about him were faint, furtive rustlings and whispers of the new day. Then in this glorified dusk of the dawn a squirrel loosed his bark of alarm, a crested jay screamed in answer, and he knew his hour of atonement was come.

He pressed forward again toward the desert, eager to be on with it. The page with the wash of blood across it seemed to take on a new vividness in the stronger light. Under the stain, the letters of the words were magnified before his mind,–“_And as ye would that men should do to you_–” It seemed to him that the blood through which they came heated the words so that they burned his eyes.

An hour after daybreak the trail led him down out of the hills by a little watercourse to the edge of the desert. Along the sides of this the chaparral grew thickly, and the spring by which he halted made a little spot of green at the edge of the gray. But out in front of him was the infinite stretch of death, far sweeps of wind-furrowed sand burning under a sun made sullen red by the clouds of fine dust in the air. Sparsely over the dull surface grew the few shrubs that could survive the heat and dryness,–stunted, unlovely things of burr, spine, thorn, or saw-edged leaf,–all bent one ways by the sand blown against them,–bristling cactus and crouching mesquite bushes.

In the vast open of the blue above, a vulture wheeled with sinister alertness; and far out among the dwarfed growing things a coyote skulked knowingly. The weird, phantom-like beauty of it stole upon him, torn as he was, while he looked over the dry, flat reaches. It was a good place to die in, this lifeless waste languishing under an angry sun. And he knew how it would come. Out to the south, as many miles as he should have strength to walk, away from any road or water-hole, a great thirst would come, and then delirium, perhaps bringing visions of cool running water and green trees. He would hurry toward these madly until he stumbled and fell and died. Then would come those cynical scavengers of the desert, the vulture wheeling lower, the coyote skulking nearer, pausing suspiciously to sniff and to see if he moved. Then a few poor bones, half-buried by the restless sand, would be left to whiten and crumble into particles of the same desert dust he looked upon. As for his soul, he shuddered to think its dissolution could not also be made as sure.

He stood looking out a long time, held by the weak spirit of a hope that some reprieve might come, from within or from on high. But he saw only the page wet with blood, and the words that burned through it into his eyes; heard only the cries of women in their death-agony and the stealthy movements of the bleeding shapes behind him. There was no ray of hope to his eye nor note of it to his ear–only the cries and the rustlings back of him, driving him out.

At last he gave his horse water, tied the bridle-rein to the horn of the saddle, headed him back over the trail to the valley and turned him loose. Then, after a long look toward the saving green of the hills, he started off through the yielding sand, his face white and haggard but hard-set. He was already weakened by fasting and loss of sleep, and the heat and dryness soon told upon him as the chill was warmed from the morning air.

When he had walked an hour, he felt he must stop, at least to rest. He looked back to see how far he had come. He was disappointed by the nearness of the hills; they seemed but a stone’s throw away. If delirium came now he would probably wander back to the water. He lay down, determining to gather strength for many more miles. The sand was hot under him, and the heat of a furnace was above, but he lay with his head on his arm and his hat pulled over his face. Soon he was half-asleep, so that dreams would alternate with flashes of consciousness; or sometimes they merged, so that he would dream he had wandered into a desert, or that the stifling heat of a desert came to him amid the snows of Echo Canon. He awakened finally with a cry, brushing from before his eyes a mass of yellow hair that a dark hand shook in his face.

He sat up, looked about a moment, and was on his feet again to the south, walking in the full glare of the sun, with his shadow now straight behind him. He went unsteadily at first, but soon felt new vigour from his rest.

He walked another hour, then turned, and was again disappointed–it was such a little distance; yet he knew now he must be too far out to find his way back when the madness came. So it was with a little sigh of contentment that he lay down again to rest or to take what might come.

Again he lay with his head on his arm in the scorching sands, with his hat above his face, and again his dreams alternated with consciousness of the desolation about him–alternated and mingled so that he no longer knew when he did not sleep. And again he was tortured to wakefulness, to thirst, and to heat, by the yellow hair brandished before him.

He sat up until he was quite awake, and then sank back upon the sand again, relieved to find that he felt too weak to walk further. His mind had become suddenly cleared so that he seemed to see only realities, and those in their just proportions. He knew he had passed sentence of death upon himself, knew he had been led to sin by his own arrogance of soul. It came to him in all its bare, hard simplicity, stripped of the illusions and conceits in which his pride had draped it, thrusting sharp blades of self-condemnation through his heart. In that moment he doubted all things. He knew he had sinned past his own forgiveness, even if pardon had come from on high; knew that no agony of spear and thorns upon the cross could avail to take him from the hell to which his own conscience had sent him.

He was quite broken. Not since the long-gone night on the river-flat across from Nauvoo had tears wet his eyes. But they fell now, and from sheer, helpless grief he wept. And then for the first time in two days he prayed–this time the prayer of the publican:–

“_God be merciful to me, a sinner_.”

Over and over he said the words, chokingly, watering the hot sands with his tears. When the paroxysm had passed, it left him, weak and prone, still faintly crying his prayer into the sand, “O God, be merciful to me, a sinner.”

When he had said over the words as long as his parched throat would let him, he became quiet. To his amazement, some new, strange peace had filled him. He took it for the peace of death. He was glad to think it was coming so gently–like a kind mother soothing him to his last sleep.

His head on his arm, his whole tired body relaxing in this new restfulness, he opened his eyes and looked off to the south, idly scanning the horizon, his eyes level with the sandy plain. Then something made him sit quickly up and stare intently, his bared head craning forward. To the south, lying low, was a mass of light clouds, volatile, changing with opalescent lights as he looked. A little to the left of these clouds, while his head was on the sand, he thought his eyes had detected certain squared lines.

Now he scanned the spot with a feverish eagerness. At first there was only the endless empty blue. Then, when his wonder was quite dead and he was about to lie down, there came a miracle of miracles,–a vision in the clear blue of the sky. And this time the lines were coherent. He, the dying sinner, had caught, clearly and positively for one awful second in that sky, the flashing impression of a cross. It faded as soon as it came, vanished while he gazed, leaving him in gasping, fainting wonder at the marvel.

And then, before he could think or question himself, the sky once more yielded its vision; again that image of a cross stayed for a second in his eyes, and this time he thought there were figures about it. Some picture was trying to show itself to him. Still reaching his body forward, gazing fearfully, his aroused body pulsing swiftly to the wonder of the thing, he began to pray again, striving to keep his excitement under.

“O God, have mercy on me, a sinner!”

Slowly at first, it grew before his fixed eyes, then quickly, so that at the last there was a complete picture where but an instant before had been but a meaningless mass of line and colour. Set on a hill were many low, square, flat-topped houses, brown in colour against the gray ground about them. In front of these houses was a larger structure of the same material, a church-like building such as he had once seen in a picture, with a wooden cross at the top. In an open square before this church were many moving persons strangely garbed, seeming to be Indians. They surged for a moment about the door of the church, then parted to either side as if in answer to a signal, and he saw a procession of the same people coming with bowed heads, scourging themselves with short whips and thorned branches. At their head walked a brown-cowled monk, holding aloft before him a small cross, attached by a chain to his waist. As he led the procession forward, another crowd, some of them being other brown-cowled monks, parted before the church door, and there, clearly before his wondering eyes was erected a great cross upon which he saw the crucified Saviour.

He saw those in the procession form about the cross and fling themselves upon the ground before it, while all the others round about knelt. He saw the monk, standing alone, raise the smaller cross in his hands above them, as if in blessing. High above it all, he saw the crucified one, the head lying over on the shoulder.

Then he, too, flung himself face down in the sand, weeping hysterically, calling wildly, and trying again to utter his prayer. Once more he dared to look up, in some sudden distrust of his eyes. Again he saw the prostrate figures, the kneeling ones farther back, the brown-cowled monk with arms upraised, and the face of agony on the cross.

He was down in the sand again, now with enough control of himself to cry out his prayer over and over. When he next looked, the vision was gone. Only a few light clouds ruffled the southern horizon.

He sank back on the sands in an ecstasy. His Witness had come–not as he thought it would, in a moment of spiritual uplift; but when he had been sunk by his own sin to fearful depths. Nor had it brought any message of glory for himself, of gifts or powers. Only the mission of suffering and service and suffering again at the end. But it was enough.

How long he lay in the joy of the realisation he never knew, but sleep or faintness at last overcame him.

He was revived by the sharp chill of night, and sat up to find his mind clear, alert, and active with new purposes. He had suffered greatly from thirst, so that when he tried to say a prayer of thanksgiving he could not move his swollen tongue. He was weakened, too, but the freezing cold of the desert night aroused all his latent force. He struggled to his feet, and laid a course by the light of the moon back to the spring he had left in the morning. How he reached the hills again he never knew, nor how he made his way over them and back to the settlement. But there he lay sick for many days, his mind, when he felt it at all, tossing idly upon the great sustaining consciousness of that vision in the desert.

The day which he next remembered clearly, and from which he dated his new life, was one when he was back in the Meadows. He had ridden there in the first vagueness and weakness of his recovery, without purpose, yet feeling that he must go. What he found there made him believe he had been led to the spot. Stark against the glow of the western sky as he rode up, was a huge cross. He stopped, staring in wonder, believing it to be another vision; but it stayed before him, rigid, bare, and uncompromising. He left his horse and climbed up to it. At its base was piled a cairn of stones, and against this was a slab with an inscription:–

“Here 120 Men, Women, and Children Were Massacred in Cold Blood Early in September, 1857.”

On the cross itself was carved in deep letters:–

“Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.”

He fell on his knees at the foot and prayed, not weeping nor in any fever of fear, but as one knowing his sin and the sin of his Church. The burden of his prayer was, “O God, my own sin cannot be forgiven–I know it well–but let me atone for the sins of this people and let me guide them aright. Let me die on this cross a hundred deaths for each life they put out, or as many more as shall be needed to save them.”

He was strong in his faith again, conscious that he himself was lost, but burning to save others, and hopeful, too, for he believed that a miracle had been vouchsafed to him in the desert.

Nor would the good _padre_, at the head of his procession of penitents in his little mission out across the desert, have doubted less that it was a miracle than did this unhappy apostle of Joseph Smith, had he known the circumstance of its timeliness; albeit he had become familiar with such phenomena of light and air in the desert.

CHAPTER XXIII.

_The Sinner Chastens himself_

How to offer the greatest sacrifice–how to do the greatest service–these had become his problems. He concerned himself no longer with his own exaltation either in this world or the world to come.

He resolved to stay south, fearing vaguely that in the North he would be in conflict with the priesthood. He knew not how; he felt that he was still sound in his faith, but he felt, too, some undefined antagonism between himself and those who preached in the tabernacle. For his home he chose the settlement of Amalon, set in a rich little valley between the shoulders of the Pine Mountains.

Late in October there was finished for him on the outer edge of the town, near the bank of a little hill-born stream, a roomy log-house, mud-chinked, with a water-tight roof of spruce shakes and a floor of whipsawed plank,–a residence fit for one of the foremost teachers in the Church, an Elder after the Order of Melchisedek, an eloquent preacher and one true to the blessed Gods. At one end of the cabin, a small room was partitioned off and a bunk built in it. A chair and a water-basin on a block comprised its furniture. This room he reserved for himself.

As to the rest of the house, his ideas were at first cloudy. He knew only that he wished to serve. Gradually, however, as his mind worked over the problem, the answer came with considerable clearness. He thought about it much on his way north, for he was obliged to make the trip to Salt Lake City to secure supplies for the winter, some needed articles of furniture for the house, and his wagons and stock.

He was helped in his thinking on a day early in the journey. Near a squalid hut on the outskirts of Cedar City he noticed a woman staggering under an armful of wood. She was bareheaded, with hair disordered, her cheeks hollowed, and her skin yellow and bloodless. He remembered the tale he had heard when he came down. He thought she must be that wife of Bishop Snow who had been put away. He rode up to the cabin as the woman threw her wood inside. She was weak and wretched-looking in the extreme.

“I am Elder Rae. I want to know if you would care to go to Amalon with me when I come back. If you do, you can have a home there as long as you like. It would be easier for you than here.”

She had looked up quickly at him in much embarrassment. She smiled a little when he had finished.

“I’m not much good to work, but I think I’d get stronger if I had plenty to eat. I used to be right strong and well.”

“I shall be along with my wagons in two weeks or a little more. If you will go with me then I would like to have you. Here, here is money to buy you food until I come.”

“You’ve heard about me, have you–that I’m a divorced woman?”

“Yes, I know.”

She looked down at the ground a moment, pondering, then up at him with sudden resolution.

“I can’t work hard and–I’m not–pretty any longer–why do you want to marry me?”

Her question made him the more embarrassed of the two, and she saw as much, but she could not tell why it was.

“Why,” he stammered, “why,–you see–but never mind. I must hurry on now. In about two weeks–” And he put the spurs so viciously to his horse that he was nearly unseated by the startled animal’s leap.

Off on the open road again he thought it out. Marriage had not been in his mind when he spoke to the woman. He had meant only to give her a home. But to her the idea had come naturally from his words, and he began to see that it was, indeed, not an unnatural thing to do. He dwelt long on this new idea, picturing at intervals the woman’s lack of any charm or beauty, her painful emaciation, her weakness.

Passing through another village later in the day, he saw the youth who had been so unfortunate as to love this girl in defiance of his Bishop. Unmolested for the time, the imbecile would go briskly a few steps and then pause with an important air of the deepest concern, as if he were engaged on an errand of grave moment. He was thinly clad and shivering in the chill of the late October afternoon.

Again, still later in the day, he overtook and passed the gaunt, gray woman who forever sought her husband. She was smiling as he passed her. Then his mind was made up.

As he entered Brigham’s office in Salt Lake City some days later, there passed out by the same door a woman whom he seemed dimly to remember. The left half of her face was disfigured by a huge flaming scar, and he saw that she had but one hand.

“Who was that woman?” he asked Brigham, after they had chatted a little of other matters.

“That’s poor Christina Lund. You ought to remember her. She was in your hand-cart party. She’s having a pretty hard time of it. You see, she froze off one hand, so now she can’t work much, and then she froze her face, so she ain’t much for looks any longer–in fact, I wouldn’t say Christina was much to start with, judging from the half of her face that’s still good–and so, of course, she hasn’t been able to marry. The Church helps her a little now and then, but what troubles her most is that she’ll lose her glory if she ain’t married. You see, she ain’t a worker and she ain’t handsome, so who’s going to have her sealed to him?”

“I remember her now. She pushed the cart with her father in it from the Platte crossing, at Fort Laramie, clear over to Echo Canon, when all the fingers of one hand came off on the bar of the cart one afternoon; and then her hand had to be amputated. Brother Brigham, she shouldn’t be cheated of her place in the Kingdom.”

“Well, she ain’t capable, and she ain’t a pretty person, so what can she do?”

“I believe if the Lord is willing I will have her sealed to me.”

“It will be your own doings, Brother Rae. I wouldn’t take it on myself to counsel that woman to anybody.”

“I feel I must do it, Brother Brigham.”

“Well, so be it if you say. She can be sealed to you and be a star in your crown forever. But I hope, now that you’ve begun to build up your kingdom, you’ll do a little better, next time. There’s a lot of pretty good-looking young women came in with a party yesterday–“

“All in good time, Brother Brigham! If you’re willing, I’ll pick up my second on the way south.”

“Well, well, now that’s good!” and the broad face of Brigham glowed with friendly enthusiasm. “You know I’d suspicioned more than once that you wasn’t overly strong on the doctrinal point of celestial marriage. I hope your second, Brother Joel, is a little fancier than this one.”

“She’ll be a better worker,” he replied.

“Well, they’re the most satisfactory in the long run. I’ve found that out myself. At any rate, it’s best to lay the foundations of your kingdom with workers, the plainer the better. After that, a man can afford something in the ornamental line now and then. Now, I’ll send for Christina and tell her what luck she’s in. She hasn’t had her endowments yet, so you might as well go through those with her. Be at the endowment-house at five in the morning.”

And so it befell that Joel Rae, Elder after the Order of Melchisedek, and Christina Lund, spinster, native of Denmark, were on the following day, after the endowment-rites had been administered, married for time and eternity.

At the door of the endowment-house they were separated and taken to rooms, where each was bathed and anointed with oil poured from a horn. A priest then ordained them to be king and queen in time and eternity. After this, they were conducted to a large apartment, and left in silence for some moments. Then voices were heard, the voice of Elohim in converse with Jehovah. They were heard to declare their intention of visiting the earth, and this they did, pronouncing it good, but deciding that one of a higher order was needed to govern the brutes. Michael, the Archangel, was then called and placed on earth under the name of Adam, receiving power over the beasts, and being made free to eat of the fruit of every tree but one. This tree was a small evergreen, with bunches of raisins tied to its branches.

Discovering that it was not good for man to be alone, Brigham, as God, then caused a sleep to fall upon Adam, and fashioned Eve from one of his ribs. Then the Devil entered, in black silk knee-breeches, approaching with many blandishments the woman who was enacting the role of Eve. The sin followed, and the expulsion from the garden.

After this impressive spectacle, Joel and the rapturous Christina were taught many signs, grips, and passwords, without which one may not pass by the gatekeepers of heaven. They were sworn also to avenge the murder of Joseph Smith upon the Gentiles who had done it, and to teach their children to do the same; to obey without questioning or murmur the commands of the priesthood; and never to reveal these secret rites under penalty of having their throats cut from ear to ear and their hearts and tongues cut out.

When this oath had been taken, they passed into a room containing a long, low altar covered with red velvet. At one end, in an armchair, sat Brigham, no longer in the role of God, but in his proper person of Prophet, Seer, and Revelator. They knelt on either side of this altar, and, with hands clasped above it in the secret grip last given to them, they were sealed for time and eternity.

From the altar they went to the wagons and began their journey south. Christina came out of the endowment-house, glowing, as to one side of her face. She was, also, in a state of daze that left her able to say but little. Proud and happy and silent, her sole remark, the first day of the trip, was: “Brigham–now–he make such a lovely, _bee-yoo-tiful_ God in heaven!”

Nor, it soon appeared, was she ever talkative. The second day, too, she spoke but once, which was when a sudden heavy shower swept down from the hills and caught her some distance from the wagons, helping to drive the cattle. Then, although she was drenched, she only said: “It make down somet’ing, I t’ink!”

For this taciturnity her husband was devoutly thankful. He had married her to secure her place in the Kingdom and a temporal home, and not otherwise did he wish to be concerned about her. He was glad to note, however, that she seemed to be of a happy disposition; which he did at certain times when her eyes beamed upon him from a face radiant with gratitude.

But his work of service had only begun. As they went farther south he began to make inquiries for the wandering wife of Elder Tench. He came upon her at length as she was starting north from Beaver at dusk. He prevailed upon her to stop with his party.

“I don’t mind to-night, sir, but I must be off betimes in the morning.”

But in the morning he persuaded her to stay with them.

“Your husband is out of the country now, but he’s coming back soon, and he will stop first at my house when he does come. So stay with me there and wait for him.”

She was troubled by this at first, but at last agreed.

“If you’re sure he will come there first–“

She refused to ride in the wagon, however, preferring to walk, and strode briskly all day in the wake of the cattle.

At Parowan he made inquiries for Tom Potwin, that other derelict, and was told that he had gone south. Him, too, they overtook on the road next day, and persuaded to go with them to a home.

When they reached Cedar City a halt was made while he went for the other woman–not without some misgiving, for he remembered that she was still young. But his second view of her reassured him–the sallow, anemic face, the skin drawn tightly over the cheek-bones, the drooping shoulders, the thin, forlorn figure. Even the certainty that her life of hardship was ended, that she was at least sure not to die of privation, had failed to call out any radiance upon her. They were married by a local Bishop, Joel’s first wife placing the hand of the second in his own, as the ceremony required. Then with his wives, his charges, his wagons, and his cattle he continued on to the home he had made at the edge of Amalon.

Among the women there was no awkwardness or inharmony; they had all suffered; and the two wives tactfully humoured the whims of the insane woman. On the day they reached home, the husband took them to the door of his own little room.

“All that out there is yours,” he said. “Make the best arrangements you can. This is my place; neither of you must ever come in here.”

They busied themselves in unpacking the supplies that had been brought, and making the house home-like. The big gray woman had already gone down the road toward the settlement to watch for her husband, promising, however, to return at nightfall. The other derelict helped the women in their work, doing with a childish pleasure the things they told him to do. The second wife occasionally paused in her tasks to look at him from eyes that were lighted to strange depths; but he had for her only the unconcerned, unknowing look that he had for the others.

At night the master of the house, when they had assembled, instructed them briefly in the threefold character of the Godhead. Then, when he had made a short prayer, he bade them good night and went to his room. Here he permitted himself a long look at the fair young face set in the little gilt oval of the rubber case. Then, as if he had forgotten himself, he fell contritely to his knees beside the bunk and prayed that this face might never remind him of aught but his sin; that he might have cross after cross added to his burden until the weight should crush him; and that this might atone, not for his own sins, which must be punished everlastingly, but in some measure for the sins of his misguided people.

In the outer room his wives, sitting together before the big fireplace, were agreeing that he was a good man.

CHAPTER XXIV.

_The Coming of the Woman-Child_

The next day he sent across the settlement for the child, waiting for her with mixed emotions,–a trembling merge of love and fear, with something, indeed, of awe for this woman-child of her mother, who had come to him so deviously and with a secret significance so mighty of portent to his own soul. When they brought her in at last, he had to brace himself to meet her.

She came and stood before him, one foot a little advanced, several dolls clutched tightly under one arm, and her bonnet swinging in the other hand. She looked up at him fearlessly, questioningly, but with no sign of friendliness. He saw and felt her mother in all her being, in her eyes and hair, in the lines of her soft little face, and indefinably in her way of standing or moving. He was seized with a sudden fear that the mother watched him secretly out of the child’s eyes, and with the child’s lips might call to him accusingly, with what wild cries of anguish and reproach he dared not guess. He strove to say something to her, but his lips were dry, and he made only some half-articulate sound, trying to force a smile of assurance.

Then the child spoke, her serious, questioning eyes upon him unwaveringly.

“Are you a damned Mormon?”

It broke the spell of awe that had lain upon him, so that he felt for the moment only a pious horror of her speech. He called Christina to take charge of her, and Martha, the second wife, to put away her little bundle of clothing, and Tom Potwin to fetch water for her bath. He himself went to be alone where he could think what must be done for her. From an entry in the little Bible, written in letters that seemed to shout to him the accusation of his crime, he had found that she must now be five years old. It was plainly time that he should begin to supply her very apparent need of religious instruction.

When she had become a little used to her surroundings later in the day, he sought to beguile her to this end, beginning diplomatically with other matters.

“Come, tell me your name, dear.”

She allowed her attention to be diverted from her largest doll.

“My name is Prudence–” She hesitated.

“Prudence–what?”

“I–I lost my mind of it.” She looked at him hopefully, to be prompted.

“Prudence Rae.”

She repeated the name, doubtingly, “Prudence Rae?”

“Yes–remember now–Prudence Rae. You are my little girl–Prudence Rae.”

“But you’re not my really papa–he’s went far off–oh, ten ninety miles far!”

“No, Prudence–God is your Father in heaven, and I am your father on earth–“

“But not my _papa_!”

“Listen, Prudence–do you know what you are?”

The puzzled look she had worn fled instantly from her face.

“I’m a generation of vipers.”

She made the announcement with a palpable ring of elation in her tones, looking at him proudly, and as if waiting to hear expressions of astonishment and delight.

“Child, child, who has told you such things? You are not that!”

She retorted, indignantly now, the lines drawing about her eyes in signal of near-by tears:

“I _am_ a generation of vipers–the Bishop said I was–he told that other mamma, and I _am_ it!”

“Well, well, don’t cry–all right–you shall be it–but I can tell you something much nicer.” He assumed a knowing air, as one who withheld knowledge of overwhelming fascinations.

“Tell me–_what_?”

[Illustration: “BUT YOU’RE NOT MY REALLY PAPA!”]

And so, little by little, hardly knowing where to begin, but feeling that any light whatsoever must profit a soul so benighted, he began to teach her. When she had been put to bed at early candle-light, he went to see if she remembered her lesson.

“What is the name of God in pure language?”

And she answered, with zest, “Ahman.”

“What is the name of the Son of God?”

“Son Ahman,–the greatest of all the parts of God excepting Ahman.”

“What is the name of man?”

“Sons Ahman.”

“That is good–my little girl shall be chosen of the Lord.”

He waited by her until sleep should come, but her mind had been stirred, and long after he thought she slept she startled him by asking, in a voice of entire wakefulness: “If I am a good little girl, and learn all the _right_ things–_then_ can I be a generation of vipers?” She lingered with relish on the phrase, giving each syllable with distinctness and gusto. When he was sure that she slept, he leaned over very carefully and kissed the pillow beside her head.

In the days that followed he wooed her patiently, seeking constantly to find some favour with her, and grateful beyond words when he succeeded ever so little. At first, he could win but slight notice of any sort from her, and that only at rare and uncertain intervals. But gradually his unobtrusive efforts told, and, little by little, she began to take him into her confidence. The first day she invited him to play with her in one of her games was a day of rejoicing for him. She showed him the dolls.

“Now, this is the mother and this is the little baby of it, and we will have a tea-party.”

She drew up a chair, placed the two dolls under it, and pointed to the opening between the rungs.

“Here is the house, and here is a little door where to go in at. You must be very, very particulyar when you go in. Now what shall we cook?” And she clasped her hands, looking up at him with waiting eagerness.

He suggested cake and tea. But this answer proved to be wrong.

“Oh, _no_!”–there was scorn in her tones–“Buffalo-hump and marrowbones and vebshtulls and lemon-coffee.”

He received the suggestion cordially, and tried to fall in with it, but she soon detected that his mind was not pliable enough for the game. She was compelled at last to dismiss him, though she accomplished the ungracious thing tactfully.

“Perhaps you have some farming to do out at the barn, because my dollies can’t _be_ very well with you at a tea-party, because you are too much.”

But she had shown a purpose of friendliness, and this sufficed him. And that night, before her bed-time, when he sat in front of the fire, she came with a most matter-of-fact unconsciousness to climb into his lap. He held her a long time, trying to breathe gently and not daring to move lest he make her uncomfortable. Her head pillowed on his arm, she was soon asleep, and he refused to give her up when Martha came to put her to bed.

Though their intimacy grew during the winter, so that she called him her father and came confidingly to him at all times, in tears or in laughter, yet he never ceased to feel an aloofness from her, an awkwardness in her presence, a fear that the mother who looked from her eyes might at any moment call to him.

That winter was also a time for the other members of the household to adapt themselves to their new life. The two wives attended capably to the house. The imbecile boy, who had once loved one of them to his own undoing, but who no longer knew her, helped them a little with the work, though for the most part he busied himself by darting off upon mysterious and important errands which he would appear to recall suddenly, but which, to his bewilderment, he seemed never able to finish. The other member of the household, Delight Tench, the gaunt, gray woman, still made sallies out to the main road to search for her deceived husband; but they taught her after a little never to go far from the settlement, and to come back to her home each night.

During the winter evenings, when they sat about the big fireplace, the master of the house taught them the mysteries of the Kingdom as revealed by God to Joseph, and then to Brigham, who had been chosen by Joseph as was Joshua by Moses to be a prophet and leader.

In time Brigham would be gathered to his Father, and in the celestial Kingdom, his wives having been sealed to him for eternity, he would beget millions and myriads of spirits. During this period of increase he would grow in the knowledge of the Gods, learning how to make matter take the form he desired. Noting the vast increase in his family, he would then say: “Let us go and make a world upon which my family of spirits may live in bodies of grosser matter, and so gain valuable experience.”

At the word of command, thereupon spoken by Brigham, the elements would come together in a new world. This he would beautify, planting seeds upon it, telling the waters where to flow, placing fishes in them, putting fowls in the air and beasts in the field. Then, calling it all good, he would say to his favourite wife: “Let us go down and inhabit this new home.” And they would go down, to be called Adam and Eve by some future Moses.

Eve would presently be tempted by Satan to eat fruit from the one tree they had been forbidden to touch, and Brigham as Adam would then partake of it, too, so she should not have to suffer alone. In a thousand years they would die, after raising many tabernacles of flesh into which their spirit children from the celestial world would have come to find abode.

Brigham, going back to the celestial world, would keep watch over these earthly children of his. Yet in their fallen nature they would in time forget their father Brigham, the world whence they came, and the world whither they were going. Sometimes he would send messages to the purest of them, and at all times he would keep as near to them as they would let him. At last he would lay a plan to bring them all again into his presence. For he would now have become the God they should worship. He would send to these children of earth his oldest son, entrusted with the mission of redeeming them, and only faith in the name of this son would secure the favour of the father.

Joel Rae instructed his wondering household, further, that such glory as this would be reserved, not for Brigham alone, but for the least of the Saints. Each Saint would progress to Godhead, and go down with his Eve to make and people worlds without end. This, he explained, was why God had made space to be infinite, since nothing less could have room for the numberless seed of man. In conclusion, he gave them the words of the Heaven-gifted Brigham: “Let all who hear these doctrines pause before they make light of them or treat them with indifference, for they will prove your salvation or your damnation.”

Yet often during that winter while he talked these doctrines he would find his mind wandering, and there would come before his eyes a little printed page with a wash of blood across it, and he would be forced to read in spite of himself the verses that were magnified before his eyes. The priesthood of which he was a product dealt but little with the New Testament. They taught from the Old almost wholly, when they went outside the Book of Mormon and the revelations to Joseph Smith–of the God of Israel who was a God of Battle, loving the reek of blood and the smell of burnt flesh on an altar–rather than of the God of the Nazarene.

He found himself turning to this New Testament, therefore, with a curious feeling of interest and surprise, dwelling long at a time upon its few, simple, forthright teachings, being moved by them in ways he did not comprehend, and finding certain of the dogmas of his Church sounding strangely in his ears even when his own lips were teaching them.

One of the verses he especially dreaded to see come before him: “But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.” He taught the child to pray, “O God, let my father have due punishment for all his sins, but teach him never to offend any little child from this day forth.”

He used to listen for this and to be soothed when he heard it. Sometimes the words would come to him when he was shut in his room; for if neither of the women was by her when she prayed, it was her custom to raise her voice as high as she could, in the belief that otherwise her prayer would not be heard by the Power she addressed. In high, piping tones this petition for himself would come through his door, following always after the request that the Lord would bless Brigham Young in his basket and in his store, multiplying and increasing him in wives, children, flocks and herds, houses and lands.

CHAPTER XXV.

_The Entablature of Truth Makes a Discovery at Amalon_

The house of Rae became a house of importance in the little settlement in the Pine Valley. It was not only the home of the highest Church official in the community, but it was the largest and best-furnished house, so that visiting dignitaries stayed there. It stood a little way from the loose-edged group of cabins that formed the nucleus of the settlement, on ground a little higher, and closer to the wooded canon that gashed the hills on the east.

The style of house most common in the village was long, low-roofed, of hewn logs, its front pierced by alternating doors and windows. From the number of these might usually be inferred the owner’s current prospects for glory in the Kingdom; for behind each door would be a wife to exalt him, and to be exalted herself thereby in the sole way open to her, to thrones, dominion, and power in the celestial world. There were many of these long, profusely doored houses; but many, too, of less external promise; of two doors or even one. Yet in a hut of one door a well-wived Saint might be building up the Kingdom temporarily, until he could provide a more spacious setting for the several stars in his crown.

Then there was the capable Bishop Wright, whose long domestic barracks were the first toward the main road beyond Bishop Coltrin’s modest two-doored hut. The Wild Ram of the Mountains, having lately been sealed to his twelfth wife, and having no suitable apartment for her, had ingeniously contrived a sleeping-place in a covered wagon-box at the end of the house,–an apartment which was now being occupied, not without some ungraceful remonstrance, by his first wife, a lady somewhat far down in the vale of years and long past the first glamour of her enthusiasm for the Kingdom. It had been her mischance to occupy previously in the community-house that apartment which the good man saw to be most suitable for his young and somewhat fastidious bride. Not without makeshifts, indeed, many of which partook of this infelicity, was the celestial order of marriage to be obeyed and the world brought back to its primitive purity and innocence.

And of all persons in any degree distressed about these or other matters of faith, Joel Rae was made the first confidant and chief comforter. In the case just cited, for example, Bishop Wright had confessed to him that, if anything could make him break asunder the cable of the Church of Christ, it would be the perplexity inevitable to a maintenance of domestic harmony under the celestial order. The first wife also distressed this adviser with a moving tale of her expulsion from a comfortable room into the incommodious wagon-box.

Many of these confidences, as the days went by, he found spirit-grieving in the extreme, so that he was often weary and longed for refuge in a wilderness. Yet he never failed to let fall some word that might be monitory or profitable to those who took him their troubles; nor did he forget to exult in these burdens that were put upon him, for he had resolved that his cross should be made as heavy as he could bear.

In addition to his duties as spiritual adviser to the community, it was his office to preach; also to hold himself at the call of the afflicted, to anoint their heads with oil and rebuke their fevers. He took an especial pleasure in this work of healing, being glad to leave his fields by day or his bed by night for the sickroom. By couches of suffering he watched and prayed, and when they began to say in Amalon that his word of rebuke to fevers came with strange power, that his touch was marvellously healing, and his prayers strangely potent, he prayed not to be set up thereby, nor to forget that the power came, not by him but through him, because of his knowing his own unworthiness. He fasted and prayed to be trusted still more until he should be worthy of that complete power which the Master had said came only by prayer and fasting.

The conscientious manner in which he performed his offices was favourably commented upon by Bishop Wright. This good man believed there had been a decline of late in the ardour of the priesthood.

“I tell you, Elder, I wish they was all as careful as you be, but they’re falling into shiftless ways. If I’m sick and have to depend on myself, all right. I’ll dose up with lobelia or gamboge, or put a blister-plaster on the back of my neck or take a drink of catnip tea or composition, and then the cure of my misery is with the Lord God of Hosts. But if I send for an administrator, it’s different. He takes the responsibility and I want him to fulfil every will of the Lord. When an Elder comes to administer to me and is afraid of greasing his fingers or of dropping a little oil on his vest, and says, ‘Oh, never mind the oil! there ain’t any virtue in the olive-oil; besides, I might grease my gloves,’ why I feel like telling such a Godless critter to walk off. When God says anoint with oil, _anoint_, I don’t care if it runs down his beard as it ran down Aaron’s. And I don’t want to talk anybody down or mention any names; but, well, next time when I got a cold and Elder Beil Wardle is the only administrator free, why, I’ll just stand or fall by myself. A basin of water-gruel, hot, with half a quart of old rum in it and lots of brown sugar, is better than all _his_ anointing.”

To make his days busier there were the affairs of the Church to oversee, for he was now President of the local Stake of Zion; reports of the teachers to consider in council meeting, of their weekly visits to each family, and of the fidelity of each of its members to the Kingdom. And there were the Deacons and Priests of the Aaronic Order and other Elders and Bishops of the Order of Melchisedek to advise with upon the temporal and spiritual affairs of Israel; to labour and pray with Peregrine Noble, who had declared that he would no longer be as limber as a tallowed rag in the hands of the priesthood, and to deliver him over to the buffetings of Satan in the flesh if he persisted in his blasphemy; to rebuke Ozro Cutler for having brazenly sought to pay on his tithing some ten pounds of butter so redolent of garlic that the store had refused to take it from him in trade; to counsel Mary Townsley that Pye Townsley would come short of his glory before God if she remained rebellious in the matter of his sealing other jewels to his crown; to teach certain unillumined Saints something of the ethics of unbranded cattle; and to warn settlers against isolating themselves in the outlying valleys where they would be a temptation to the red sons of Laman.

Again there was the rite of baptism to be administered,–not an onerous office in the matter of the living, but apt to become so in the case of the dead; for the whole world had been in darkness and sin since the apostolic gifts were lost, ages ago, and the number of dead whose souls now waited for baptism was incalculable; and not until the living had been baptised for them could they enter the celestial Kingdom. In consequence, all earnest souls were baptised tirelessly for their loved ones who had gone behind the veil before Peter, James, and John ordained Joseph Smith.

But the unselfish did not confine their efforts to friends and relatives. In the village of Amalon that winter and spring, Amarintha, third wife of Sarshell Sweezy, bethought her to be baptised for Queen Anne; whereupon Ezra Colver at once underwent the same rite for this lamented queen’s husband, Prince George of Denmark; thereby securing the prompt admission of the royal couple to the full joys of the Kingdom.

Attention being thus turned to royalty, the first Napoleon and his first consort were baptised into heaven by thoughtful proxies; then Queen Elizabeth and Henry the Eighth. Eric Glines, being a liberal-minded man, was baptised for George Washington, thus adding the first President of the Gentile nation to the galaxy of Mormon Saints reigning in heaven. Gilbroid Sumner thereupon won the fervent commendation of his Elder by submitting twice to burial in the waters of baptism for the two thieves on the cross.

From time to time the little settlement was visited by officials of the Church who journeyed south from Salt Lake City; perhaps one of the powerful Twelve Apostles, those who bind on earth that which is bound in heaven; or High Priests, Counsellors, or even Brigham himself with his favourite wife and a retinue of followers in stately procession.

Late in the spring, also, came the Patriarch in the Church, Uncle John Young, eldest brother of Brigham. It was the office of this good man to dispense blessings to the faithful; blessings written and preserved reverently in the family archives as charms to ward off misfortune. Through all the valleys Uncle John was accustomed to go on his mission of light. When he reached a settlement announcement was made of his headquarters, and the unblessed were invited to wait upon him.

The cynical had been known to complain that Uncle John was a hard man to deal with, especially before money was current in the Territory, when blessings had to be paid for in produce. Many a Saint, these said, had long gone unblessed because the only produce he had to give chanced to meet no need of Uncle John. Further, they gossiped, if paid in butter or fine flour or fat turkeys when these were scarce, Uncle John was certain to give an unusually strong blessing, perhaps insuring, on top of freedom from poverty and disease, the prolongation of life until the coming of the Messiah. Yet it is not improbable that all these tales were insecurely based upon a single instance wherein one Starling Driggs, believing himself to stand in urgent need of a blessing, had offered to pay Uncle John for the service in vinegar. It had been unexceptionable vinegar, as Uncle John himself admitted, but being a hundred miles from home, and having no way to carry it, the Patriarch had been obliged to refuse; which had seemed to most people not to have been more than fell within the lines of reason.

As for the other stories, it is enough to say that Uncle John was himself abundantly blessed with wives and children needing to be fed, that the labourer is worthy of his hire, and that it was sometimes vexatious to follow rapid fluctuations in the market value of butter, eggs, beef, potatoes, beet-molasses, and the like. Certain it is that after money came to circulate it was a much more satisfactory business all around; two dollars a blessing–flat, and no grievances on either side, with a slight reduction if several were blessed in one family. When Uncle John laid his hands upon a head after that, every one knew the exact pecuniary significance of the act.

When the Patriarch stopped at Amalon that spring, at the house of Joel Rae, there were many blessings to be made, and from morning until night for several days he was busy with the writing of them. Two members of the household he interested to an uncommon degree,–the child, Prudence, who forthwith began daily to promise her dolls that they should not taste of death till Christ came, and Tom Potwin, the imbecile, who became for some unknown reason covetous of a blessing for himself. He stayed about the Patriarch most of the time, bothering him with appeals for one of his blessings. But Uncle John, though a good man, had been gifted by Heaven with slight imagination, and Tom Potwin would doubtless have had to go without this luxury but for a chance visitor to the house one day.

This was no less a person than Bishop Snow, he who had once been Tom Potwin’s rival for the hand of her who was now the second Mrs. Rae. With his portly figure, his full, florid face with its massive jaw, and his heavy locks of curling white hair, the good Bishop seemed indeed to have deserved the title put upon him years ago by the Church Poet,–The Entablature of Truth.

He alighted from his wagon and greeted Uncle John, busy with the writing of his blessings in the cool shade just outside the door.

“Good for you, Uncle John! Be a fountain of living waters to the thirsty in Zion. Say, who’s that?” and he pointed to Tom Potwin who had been wistfully watching the pen of the Patriarch as it ran over his paper. Uncle John regarded the Bishop shrewdly.

“You ought to know, Brother Snow. ‘Tain’t so long since you and him were together.”

The Bishop looked closely again, and the boy now returned his gaze with his own weakly foolish look.

“Well! If it ain’t that Tom Potwin. The Lord certainly hardened _his_ heart against counsel to his own undoing. I tried every way in the world–say, what’s he doing here?”

“Oh, Brother Rae has given him a home here along with that first woman of Brother Tench’s. The crazy loon has been bothering me all week to give him a blessing.”

The Entablature of Truth chuckled, being not without a sense of humour.

“Well, say, give him one if he wants it. Here–here’s your two dollars–write him a good one now.”

Uncle John took the money, and at once began writing upon a clean sheet of paper. The boy stood by watching him eagerly, and when the Patriarch had finished the document took it from him with trembling hands. The Bishop spoke to him.

“Here, boy, let’s see what Uncle John gives us for our money.”

With some misgiving the owner of the blessing relinquished it into the Bishop’s hand, watching it jealously, though listening with delight while his benefactor read it.

“Patriarchal blessing of Tom Potwin by John Young, Patriarch, given at Amalon June 1st, 1859. Brother Tom Potwin, in the name of Jesus of Nazareth and by authority of the Holy Priesthood in me vested, I confer upon thee a Patriarch’s blessing. Thou art of Ephraim through the loins of Joseph that was sold into Egypt. And inasmuch as thou hast obeyed the requirements of the Gospel thy sins are forgiven thee. Thy name is written in the Lamb’s book of life never more to be blotted out. Thou art a lawful heir to all the blessings of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the new and everlasting covenant. Thou shalt have a numerous posterity who shall rise up to call thee blessed. Thou shalt have power over thine enemies. They that oppose thee shall yet come bending unto thee. Thou shalt come forth in the morning of the first resurrection, and no power shall hinder except the shedding of innocent blood or the consenting thereto. I seal thee up to eternal life in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen and amen!”

The worthy Bishop handed the paper back to the enraptured boy, and turned to Joel Rae, who now came up.

“Hello, Brother Rae. I hear you took on that thirteenth woman of mine. Much good it’ll do you! She was unlucky for me, sure enough– rambunctious when she was healthy, and lazy when she was sick!”

When they came out of the house half an hour later, he added in tones of confidential warning:

“Say, you want to look out for her–I see she’s getting the red back in her blood!”

CHAPTER XXVI.

_How the Red Came Back to the Blood to be a Snare_

The watchful eyes of the Bishop had seen truly. Not only was the red coming back to the blood of Martha, but the fair flesh to her meagre frame, the spring of youth to her step and living fire to her voice and the glance of her eyes. Her husband was pleased. He had made a new creature of the poor, worn wreck found by the wayside, weak, emaciated, reeling under her burden. He rejoiced to know he had done a true service. He was glad, moreover, to know that she made an admirable mother to the little woman-child. Prudence, indeed, had brought them closer to each other, slowly, subtly, in little ways to disarm the most timid caution.

And this mothering and fathering of little Prudence was a work by no means colourless or uneventful. The child had displayed a grievous capacity for remaining unimpressed by even the best-weighed opinions of her protector. She was also appallingly fluent in and partial to the idioms and metaphors of revealed religion,–a circumstance that would not infrequently cause the sensitive to shudder.

Thus, when she chose to call her largest and least sightly doll the Holy Ghost, the ingenuity of those about her was taxed to rebuke her in ways that would be effective without being harsh. It was felt, too, that her offence had been but slightly mitigated when she called the same doll, thereafter, “Thou son of perdition and shedder of innocent blood.” Not until this disfigured effigy became Bishop Wright, and the remaining dolls his more or less disobedient wives, was it felt that she had approached even remotely the plausible and the decorous.

A glance at some of the verses she was from time to time constrained to learn will perhaps indicate the line of her transgressions, and yet avert a disclosure of details that were often tragic. She was taught these verses from a little old book bound in the gaudiest of Dutch gilt paper, as if to relieve the ever-present severity of the text and the distressing scenes portrayed in the illustrating copperplates. For example, on a morning when there had been hasty words at breakfast, arising from circumstances immaterial to this narrative, she might be made to learn:–

“That I did not see Frances just now I am glad, For Winifred says she looked sullen and sad. When I ask her the reason, I know very well That Frances will blush the true reason to tell.

“And I never again shall expect to hear said That she pouts at her milk with a toast of white bread, When both are as good as can possibly be– Though Betsey, for breakfast, perhaps may have tea.”

With no sort of propriety could be set down in printed words the occurrence that led to her reciting twenty times, somewhat defiantly in the beginning, but at last with the accents and expression of countenance proper to remorse, the following verses:–

“Who was it that I lately heard
Repeating an improper word?
I do not like to tell her name
Because she is so much to blame.”

Indeed, she came to thunder the final verse with excellent gestures of condemnatory rage:–

“Go, naughty child! and hide your face, I grieve to see you in disgrace;
Go! you have forfeited to-day
All right at trap and ball to play.”

Nor is it necessary to go back of the very significant lines themselves to explain the circumstance of her having the following for a half-day’s burden:–

“Jack Parker was a cruel boy,
For mischief was his sole employ; And much it grieved his friends to find His thoughts so wickedly inclined.

“But all such boys unless they mend
May come to an unhappy end,
Like Jack, who got a fractured skull Whilst bellowing at a furious bull.”

Nor is there sufficient reason to say why she was often counselled to regard as her model:–

“Miss Lydia Banks, though very young, Will never do what’s rude or wrong;
When spoken to she always tries
To give the most polite replies.”

And painful, indeed, would it be to relate the events of one sad day which culminated in her declaiming at night, with far more than perfunctory warmth, and in a voice scarce dry of tears:–

“Miss Lucy Wright, though not so tall, Was just the age of Sophy Ball;
But I have always understood
Miss Sophy was not half so good;
For as they both had faded teeth, Their teacher sent for Doctor Heath.

“But Sophy made a dreadful rout
And would not have hers taken out; While Lucy Wright endured the pain,
Nor did she ever once complain.
Her teeth returned quite sound and white, While Sophy’s ached both day and night.”

Yet her days were by no means all of reproof nor was her reproof ever harsher than the more or less pointed selections from the moral verses could inflict. Under the watchful care of Martha she flourished and was happy, her mother in little, a laughing whirlwind of tender flesh, tireless feet, dancing eyes, hair of sunlight that was darkening as she grew older, and a mind that seemed to him she called father a miracle of unfoldment. It was a mind not so quickly receptive as he could have wished to the learning he tried patiently to impart; he wondered, indeed, if she were not unduly frivolous even for a child of six; for she would refuse to study unless she could have the doll she called Bishop Wright with her and pretend that she taught the lesson to him, finding him always stupid and loth to learn. He hoped for better things from her mind as she aged, watching anxiously for the buddings of reason and religion, praying daily that she should be increased in wisdom as in stature. He had become so used to the look of her mother in her face that it now and then gave him an instant of unspeakable joy. But the sound of his own voice calling her “Prudence” would shock him from this as with an icy blast of truth.

When the children of Amalon came to play with her, the little Nephis, Moronis, Lehis, and Juabs, he saw she was a creature apart from them, of another fashion of mind and body. He saw, too, that with some native intuition she seemed to divine this, and to assume command even of those older than herself. Thus Wish Wright and his brother, Welcome, both her seniors by several years, were her awe-bound slaves; and the twin daughters of Zebedee Bloom obeyed her least whim without question, even when it involved them in situations more or less delicate. With her quick ear for rhythm she had been at once impressed by their names–impressed to a degree that savoured of fascination. She would seat the two before her, range the other children beside them, and then lead the chorus in a spirited chant of these names:–

“Isa Vinda Exene Bloom!
Ella Minda Almarine Bloom!”

repeating this a long time until they were all breathless, and the solemn twins themselves were looking embarrassed and rather foolishly pleased.

As he observed her day by day in her joyous growth, it was inevitable that he came more and more to observe the woman who was caring for her, and it was thus on one night in late summer that he awoke to an awful truth,–a truth that brought back the words of the woman’s former husband with a new meaning.

He had heard Prudence say to her, “You are a pretty mamma,” and suddenly there came rushing upon him the sum of all the impressions his eyes had taken of her since that day when the Bishop had spoken. He trembled and became weak under the assault, feeling that in some insidious way his strength had been undermined. He went out into the early evening to be alone, but she, presently, having put the child to bed, came and stood near, silently in the doorway.

He looked and saw she was indeed made new, restored to the lustre and fulness of her young womanhood. He remembered then that she had long been silent when he came near her, plainly conscious of his presence but with an apparent constraint, with something almost tentative in her manner. With her return to health and comeliness there had come back to her a thousand little graces of dress and manner and speech. She drew him, with his starved love of beauty and his need of companionship; drew him with a mighty power, and he knew it at last. He remembered how he had felt and faintly thrilled under a certain soft suppression in her tones when she had spoken to him of late; this had drawn him, and the new light in her eyes and her whole freshened womanhood, even before he knew it. Now that he did know it he felt himself shaken and all but lost; clutching weakly at some support that threatened every moment to give way.

And she was his wife, his who had starved year after year for the light touch of a woman’s hand and the tones of her voice that should be for him alone. He knew now that he had ached and sickened in his yearning for this, and she stood there for him in the soft night. He knew she was waiting, and he knew he desired above all things else to go to her; that the comfort of her, his to take, would give him new life, new desires, new powers; that with her he would revive as she had done. He waited long, indulging freely in hesitation, bathing his wearied soul in her nearness–yielding in fancy.

Then he walked off into the night, down through the village, past the light of open doors, and through the voices that sounded from them, out on to the bare bench of the mountain–his old refuge in temptation–where he could be safe from submitting to what his soul had forbidden. He had meant to take up a cross, but before his very eyes it had changed to be a snare set for him by the Devil.

He stayed late on the ground in the darkness, winning the battle for himself over and over, decisively, he thought, at the last. But when he went home she was there in the doorway to meet him, still silent, but with eyes that told more than he dared to hear. He thought she had in some way divined his struggle, and was waiting to strengthen the odds against him, with her face in the light of a candle she held above her head.

He went by her without speaking, afraid of his weakness, and rushed to his little cell-like room to fight the battle over. As a last source of strength he took from its hiding-place the little Bible. And as it fell open naturally at the blood-washed page a new thing came, a new torture. No sooner had his eyes fallen on the stain than it seemed to him to cry out of itself, so that he started back from it. He shut the book and the cries were stilled; he opened it and again he heard them–far, loud cries and low groans close to his ear; then long piercing screams stifled suddenly too low, horrible gurglings. And before him came the inscrutable face with the deep gray eyes and the shining lips, lifting, with love in the eyes, above a gashed throat.

He closed the book and fell weakly to his knees to pray brokenly, and almost despairingly: “Help me to keep down this self within me; let it ask for nothing; fan the fires until they consume it! _Bow me, bend me, break me, burn me out–burn me out_!”

In the morning, when he said, “Martha, the harvest is over now, and I want you to go north with me,” she prepared to obey without question.

He talked freely to her on the way, though it is probable that he left in her mind little more than dark confusion, beyond the one clear fact of his wish. As to this, she knew she must have no desire but to comply. Reaching Salt Lake City, they went at once to Brigham’s office. When they came out they came possessed of a document in duplicate, reciting that they both did “covenant, promise, and agree to dissolve all the relations which have hitherto existed between us as husband and wife, and to keep ourselves separate and apart from each other from this time forth.”

This was the simple divorce which Brigham was good enough to grant to such of the Saints as found themselves unhappily married, and wished it. As Joel Rae handed the Prophet the fee of ten dollars, which it was his custom to charge for the service, Brigham made some timely remarks. He said he feared that Martha had been perverse and rebellious; that her first husband had found her so; and that it was doubtless for the good of all that her second had taken the resolution to divorce her. He was afraid that Brother Joel was an inferior judge of women; but he had surely shown himself to be generous in the provision he was making for the support of this contumacious wife.

They parted outside the door of the little office, and he kissed her for the first time since they had been married–on the forehead.

CHAPTER XXVII.

_A New Cross Taken up and an Old Enemy Forgiven_

Christina would now be left alone with the cares of the house, and he knew he ought to have some one to help her. The fever of sacrifice was also upon him. And so he found another derelict, to whom he was sealed forever.

At a time of more calmness he might have balked at this one. She was a cross, to be sure, and it was now his part in life to bear crosses. But there were plenty of these, and even one vowed to a life of sacrifice, he suspected, need not grossly abuse the powers of discrimination with which Heaven had seen fit to endow him. But he had lately been on the verge of a seething maelstrom, balancing there with unholy desire and wickedly looking far down, and the need to atone for this sin excited him to indiscretions.

It was not that this star in his crown was in her late thirties and less than lovely. He had learned, indeed, that in the game which, for the chastening of his soul, he now played with the Devil, it were best to choose stars whose charms could excite to little but conduct of a saintlike seemliness. The fat, dumpy figure of this woman, therefore, and her round, flat, moonlike face, her mouse-coloured wisps of hair cut squarely off at the back of her neck, were points of a merit that was in its whole effect nothing less than distinguished.

But she talked. Her tones played with the constancy of an ever-living fountain. Artlessly she lost herself in the sound of their music, until she also lost her sense of proportion, of light and shade, of simple, Christian charity. Her name was Lorena Sears, and she had come in with one of the late trains of converts, without friends, relatives, or means, with nothing but her natural gifts and an abiding faith in the saving powers of the new dispensation. And though she was so alive in her faith, rarely informed in the Scriptures, bubbling with enthusiasm for the new covenant, the new Zion, and the second coming of the Messiah, there had seemed to be no place for her. She had not been asked in marriage, nor had she found it easy to secure work to support herself.

“She’s strong,” said Brigham, to his inquiring Elder, “and a good worker, but even Brother Heber Kimball wouldn’t marry her; and between you and me, Brother Joel, I never knew Heber to shy before at anything that would work. You can see that, yourself, by looking over his household.”

But, after the needful preliminaries, and a very little coy hesitation on the part of the lady, Lorena Sears, spinster, native of Elyria, Ohio, was duly sealed to, for time and eternity, and became a star forever in the crown of, Joel Rae, Elder after the Order of Melchisedek in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and President of the Amalon Stake of Zion.

In the bustle of the start south there were, of necessity, moments in which the crown’s new star could not talk; but these blessed respites were at an end when at last they came to the open road.

At first, as her speech flowed on, he looked sidelong at her, in a trouble of fear and wonder; then, at length, absently, trying to put his mind elsewhere and to leave her voice as the muted murmur of a distant torrent. He succeeded fairly well in this, for Lorena combined admirably in herself the parts of speaker and listener, and was not, he thankfully noted, watchful of his attention.

But in spite of all he could do, sentences would come to seize upon his ears: “… No chance at all back there for a good girl with any heart in her unless she’s one of the doll-baby kind, and, thank fortune, I never was _that_! Now there was Wilbur Watkins–his father was president of the board of chosen freeholders–Wilbur had a way of saying, ‘Lorena’s all right–she weighs a hundred and seventy-eight pounds on the big scales down to the city meatmarket, and it’s most of it heart–a hundred and seventy-eight pounds and most all heart–and she’d be a prize to anybody,’ but then, that was his way,–Wilbur was a good deal of a take-on,–and there was never anything between him and me. And when the Elder come along and begun to preach about the new Zion and tell about the strange ways that the Lord had ordered people to act out here, something kind of went all through me, and I says, ‘That’s the place for _me_!’ Of course, the saying is, ‘There ain’t any Gawd west of the Missouri,’ but them that says it ain’t of the house of Israel–lots of folks purtends to be great Bible readers, but pin ’em right down and what do you find?–you find they ain’t really studied it–not what you could call _pored_ over it. They fuss through a chapter here and there, and rush lickety-brindle through another, and ain’t got the blessed truth out of any of ’em–little fine points, like where the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart every time, for why?–because if He hadn’t ‘a’ done it Pharaoh would ‘a’ give in the very first time and spoiled the whole thing. And then the Lord would visit so plumb natural and commonlike with Moses–like tellin’ him, ‘I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob by the name of God Almighty, for by my name Jehovah was I not known unto them.’ I thought that was awful cute and friendly, stoppin’ to talk about His name that way. Oh, I’ve spent hours and hours over the blessed Book. I bet I know something you don’t, now–what verse in the Bible has every letter in the alphabet in it except ‘J’? Of course you wouldn’t know. Plenty of preachers don’t. It’s the twenty-first verse of the seventh chapter of the book of Ezra. And the Book of Mormon–I do love to git set down in a rocker with my shoes off–I’m kind of a heavy-footed person to be on my feet all day–and that blessed Book in my hands–such beautiful language it uses–that verse I love so, ‘He went forth among the people waving the rent of his garment in the air that all might see the writing which he had wrote upon the rent,’–that’s sure enough Bible language, ain’t it? And yet some folks say the Book of Mormon ain’t inspired. And that lovely verse in Second Niphi, first chapter, fourteenth verse: ‘Hear the words of a trembling parent whose limbs you must soon lay down in the cold and silent grave from whence no traveller can return.’ Back home the