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 school-teacher got hold of that—he's an awful smarty—and he says, 'Oh, that's from Shakespeare,' or some such book, just like that—and I just give him one look, and I says, 'Mr. Lyman Hickenlooper, if you'll take notice,' I says, 'you'll see those words was composed by the angel Moroni over two thousand years ago and revealed to Joseph Smith in the sacred light of the Urim and Thummim,' I says, and the plague-oned smarty snickered right in my face—and say, now, what did you and your second git a separation for?"

He was called back by the stopping of her voice, but she had to repeat her question before he understood it. The Devil tempted him in that moment. He was on the point of answering, "Because she talked too much," but instead he climbed out of the wagon to walk. He walked most of the three hundred miles in the next ten days. Nights and mornings he falsely pretended to be deaf.

He found himself in this long walk full of a pained discouragement; not questioning or doubting, for he had been too well trained ever to do either. But he was disturbed by a feeling of bafflement, as might be a ground-mole whose burrow was continually destroyed by an enemy it could not see. This feeling had begun in Salt Lake City, for there he had seen that the house of Israel was no longer unspotted of the world. Since the army with its camp-followers had come there was drunkenness and vice, the streets resounded with strange oaths, and the midnight murder was common. Even Brigham seemed to have become a gainsayer in behalf of Mammon, and the people, quick to follow his lead, were indulging in ungodly trade with Gentiles; even with the army that had come to invade them. And more and more the Gentiles were coming in. He heard strange tales of the new facilities afforded them. There was actually a system of wagon-trains regularly hauling freight from the Missouri to the Pacific; there was a stage-route bringing passengers and mail from Babylon; even Horace Greeley had been publicly entertained in Zion,—accorded honour in the Lord's stronghold. There was talk, too, of a pony-express, to bring them mail from the Missouri in six days; and a few visionaries were prophesying that a railroad would one day come by them. The desert was being peopled all about them, and neighbours were forcing a way up to their mountain retreat.

It seemed they were never to weld into one vast chain the broken links of the fated house of Abraham; never to be free from Gentile contamination. He groaned in spirit as he went—walking well ahead of his wagon.

But he had taken up a new cross and he had his reward. The first night after they reached home he took the little Bible from its hiding-place and opened it with trembling hands. The stain was there, red in the candle-light. But the cries no longer rang in his ears as on that other night when he had been sinful before the page. And he was glad, knowing that the self within him had again been put down.

Then came strange news from the East—news of a great civil war. The troops of the enemy at Camp Floyd hurried east to battle, and even the name of that camp was changed, for the Gentile Secretary of War, said gossip from Salt Lake City, after doing his utmost to cripple his country by sending to far-off Utah the flower of its army, had now himself become not only a rebel but a traitor.

Even Johnston, who had commanded the invading army, denouncing the Saints as rebels, had put off his blue uniform for a gray and was himself a rebel.

When the news came that South Carolina had actually flung the palmetto flag to the breeze and fired the first gun, he was inclined to exult. For plainly it was the Lord's work. There was His revelation given to Joseph Smith almost thirty years before: "Verily, thus saith the Lord concerning the wars that will come to pass, beginning at the rebellion of South Carolina." And ten years later the Lord had revealed to Joseph further concerning this prophecy that this war would be "previous to the coming of the Son of Man." Assuredly, they were now near the time when other Prophets of the Church had said He would come—the year 1870. He thrilled to be so near the actual moving of the hand of God, and something of the old spirit revived within him.

From Salt Lake City came news of the early fighting and of meetings for public rejoicing held in the tabernacle, with prophecies that the Gentile nation would now be rent asunder in punishment for its rejection of the divine message of the Book of Mormon and its persecution of the prophets of God. In one of these meetings of public thanksgiving Brigham had said from the tabernacle pulpit: "What is the strength of this man Lincoln? It is like a rope of sand. He is as weak as water,—an ignorant, Godless shyster from the backwoods of Illinois. I feel disgraced in having been born under a government that has so little power for truth and right. And now it will be broken in pieces like a potter's vessel."

These public rejoicings, however, brought a further trial upon the Saints. The Third California Infantry and a part of the Second Cavalry were now ordered to Utah. The commander of this force was one Connor, an officer of whom extraordinary reports were brought south. It was said that he had issued an order directing commanders of posts, camps, and detachments to arrest and imprison "until they took the oath of allegiance, all persons who from this date shall be guilty of uttering treasonable sentiments against the government of the United States." Even liberty of opinion, it appeared, was thus to be strangled in these last days before the Lord came.

Further, this ill-tempered Gentile, instead of keeping decently remote from Salt Lake City, as General Johnston had done, had marched his troops into the very stronghold of Zion, despite all threats of armed opposition, and in the face of a specific offer from one Prophet, Seer, and Revelator to wager him a large sum of money that his forces would never cross the River Jordan. To this fair offer, so reports ran, the Gentile officer had replied that he would cross the Jordan if hell yawned below it; that he had thereupon viciously pulled the ends of a grizzled, gray moustache and proceeded to behave very much as an officer would be expected to behave who was commonly known as "old Pat Connor."

Knowing that the forces of the Saints outnumbered his own, and that he was, in his own phrase, "six hundred miles of sand from reinforcements," he had halted his command two miles from the city, formed his column with an advance-guard of cavalry and a light battery, the infantry and the commissary-wagons coming next, and in this order, with bayonets fixed, cannon shotted, and two bands playing, had marched brazenly in the face of the Mormon authorities and through the silent crowds of Saints to Emigrant Square. Here, in front of the governor's residence, where flew the only American flag to be seen in the whole great city, he had, with entire lack of dignity, led his men in three cheers for the country, the flag, and the Gentile governor.

After this offensive demonstration, he had perpetrated the supreme indignity by going into camp on a bench at the base of Wasatch Mountain, in plain sight of the city, there in the light of day training his guns upon it, and leaving a certain twelve-pound howitzer ranged precisely upon the residence of the Lion of the Lord.

Little by little these galling reports revived the military spirit in an Elder far to the south, who had thought that all passion was burned out of him. But this man chanced to open a certain Bible one night to a page with a wash of blood across it. From this page there seemed to come such cries and screams of fear in the high voices of women and children, such sounds of blows on flesh, and the warm, salt smell of blood, that he shut the book and hastily began to pray. He actually prayed for the preservation of that ancient first enemy of his Church, the government of the United States. Individually and collectively, as a nation, as States, and as people, he forgave them and prayed the Lord to hold them undivided.

Then he knew that an astounding miracle of grace had been wrought within him. For this prayer for the hostile government was thus far his greatest spiritual triumph.



CHAPTER XXVIII.

Just Before the End of the World

The years of the Civil War passed by, and the prayer of Joel Rae was answered. But the time was now rapidly approaching when the Son of Man was to come in person to judge Israel and begin his reign of a thousand years on the purified earth. The Twelve, confirmed by Brigham, had long held that this day of wrath would not be deferred past 1870. In the mind of Joel Rae the time had thus been authoritatively fixed. The date had been further confirmed by the fulfilment of Joseph's prophecy of war. The great event was now to be prepared for and met in all readiness.

It was at this time that he betrayed in the pulpit a leaning toward views that many believed to be heterodox. "A likely man is a likely man," he preached, "and a good man is a good man—whether in this Church or out of it." He also went so far as to intimate that being in the Church would not of itself suffice to the attainment of glory; that there were, to put it bluntly, all kinds of fish in the gospel net; sinners not a few in Zion who would have to be forgiven their misdeeds seventy times seven on that fateful day drawing near.

Bishop Wright, who followed him on this Sabbath, was bold to speak to another effect.

"Me and my brethren," he insisted, "have received our endowments, keys, and blessings—all the tokens and signs that can be given to man for his entrance through the celestial gate. If you have had these in the house of the Lord, when you depart this life you will be able to walk back to the presence of the Father, passing the angels that stand as sentinels; because why?—because you can give them the tokens, signs, and grips pertaining to the holy priesthood and gain your eternal exaltation in spite of earth and hell. But how about the likely and good man outside this Church who has rejected the message of the Book of Mormon and ain't got these signs and passwords? If he's going to be let in, too, why have doorkeepers, and what's the use of the whole business? Why in time did the Lord go to all this trouble, any way, if Brother Rae is right? Why was Joseph Smith visited by an angel clad in robes of light, who told him where the golden plates had been hid up by the Lord, and the Urim and Thummim, and who laid hands on him and give him the Holy Ghost? And after all that trouble He's took, do you think He's going to let everybody in? Not much, Mary Ann! The likely men may come the roots on some of our soft-hearted Elders, but they won't fool the Lord's Christ and His angel gatekeepers."

Elder Beil Wardle, on the other hand, showed a tendency to side with the liberalism of Brother Rae. He cited the fact that not all revelations were from God. Some were from perverse human spirits and some from the very Devil himself. There was Elder Sidney Roberts, who had once suffered a revelation that a certain brother must give him a suit of finest broadcloth and a gold watch, the best to be had; and another revelation directing him to salute all the younger sisters, married or single, with a kiss of holiness. Urged to confess that these revelations were from the Devil, he had refused, and so had been cut off and delivered over to the buffetings of Satan in the flesh.

"And you can't always be sure of the Holy Ghost, either," he continued. "When the Lord pours out the Holy Ghost on an individual, he will have spasms, and you would think he was going to have fits; but it don't make him get up and go pay his debts—not by a long shot. Of course I don't feel to mention any names, but what can you expect, anyway? A flock of a thousand sheep has got to be mighty clean if some of them ain't smutty. This is a large flock of sheep that has come up into this valley of the mountains, and some of them have got tag-locks hanging about them. But it don't seem to pester the Lord any. He sifted us good in Missouri, and He put us into another sieve at Nauvoo, and I reckon His sieve will be brought along with Him on the day of judgment. And if there are some lost sheep in the fold of Zion, maybe, on the other hand, there's some outside the fold that will be worth saving; that will be broke off from the wild olive-tree and grafted on to the tame olive-tree to partake of its sap and fatness."

Joel Rae would have taken more comfort in this championship of his views if it were not for his suspicion that Elder Wardle sometimes spoke in a tone of levity, and had indeed more than once been reckoned as a doubter. It was even related of him that a perverted sense of humour had once inspired him to deliver an irreverent and wholly immaterial address in pure Choctaw at a service where many others of the faithful had been moved to speak in tongues; and that an earnest sister, believing the Holy Ghost to be strong upon her, had thereupon arisen and interpreted his speech to be the Lord's description of the glories of their new temple, which it had not been at all. Such a man might have a good heart, as he knew Elder Wardle to have; but he must be an inferior guide to the Father's presence. He was even less inclined to trust him when Wardle announced confidentially at the close of the meeting that day, "Brother Wright talks a good deal jest to hear his head roar. You'd think he'd been the midwife at the borning of the world, and helped to nurse it and bring it up—he's that knowing about it. My opinion is he don't know twice across or straight up about the Lord's secret doings!"

Yet if he had sought to render a little elastic the rigid teachings of the priesthood, he had done so innocently. The foundations of his faith were unshaken; for him the rock upon which his Church was built had never been more stable. As to doubting its firmness, he would as soon have blasphemed the Holy Ghost or disputed the authority of Brigham, with whom was the sacred deposit of doctrine and all temporal and spiritual power.

So he sighed often for those Gentile sheep on whom the wrath of God was so soon to fall. Even with the utmost stretching of the divine mercy, the greater part of them must perish; and for the lost souls of these he grieved much and prayed each day.

It was more than ten years since that day in the Meadows, and the blight there put upon his person had waxed with each year. His hair showed now but the faintest sprinkle of black, his shoulders were bent and rounded as if bearing invisible burdens, and his face had the look of drooping in grief and despair, as one who was made constantly to look upon all the suffering of all the world. Yet he wore always, except when alone, a not unpleasant little effort of a smile, as if he would conceal his pain. But this deceived few. The women of the settlement had come to call him "the little man of sorrows." Even his wife, Lorena, had divined that his mind was not one with hers; that, somehow, there was a gulf between them which her best-meant cheerfulness could not span. In a measure she had ceased to try, doing little more than to sing, when he was near, some hymn which she considered suitable to his condition. One favourite at such times began:—

"Lord, we are vile, conceived in sin, And born unholy and unclean; Sprung from the man whose guilty fall Corrupts his race and taints us all.

"Soon as we draw our infant breath, The seeds of sin grow up for death; The law demands a perfect heart, But we're defiled in every part."

She would sing many verses of this with appealing unction, so long as he was near; yet when he came upon her unawares he might hear her voicing some cheerful, secular ballad, like—

"As I went down to Coffey's mills Some pleasure for to see, I fell in love with a railroad-er, He fell in love with me."

The stolid Christina listened entranced to all of Lorena's songs, charmed by the melody not less than she was awed by her sister-wife's superior gifts of language. The husband, too, listened not without resignation, reflecting that, when Lorena did not sing, she talked. For the unspeaking Christina he had learned to feel an admiration that bordered upon reverence, finding in her silence something spiritually great. Yet of the many-worded Lorena he was never heard to complain through all the years. The nearest he approached to it was on a day when Elder Beil Wardle had sought to condole with him on the affliction of her ready speech.

"That woman of yours," said this observant friend, "sure takes large pie-bites out of any little talk that happens to get going."

"She does have the gift of continuance," her husband had admitted. But he had added, hastily, "Though her heart is perfect with the Lord."

The fact that she was sealed to him for eternity, and that she believed she would constitute one of his claims to exaltation in the celestial world, were often matters of pious speculation with him. He wondered if he had done right by her. She deserved a husband who would be saved into the kingdom, while he who had married her was irrevocably lost.

There had been a time when he read with freshened hope the promises of forgiveness in that strange New Testament. Once he had even believed that these might save him; that he was again numbered with the elect. But when this belief had grown firm, so that he could seem to rest his weight upon it, he felt it fall away to nothing under him, and the truth he had divined that day in the desert was again bared before him. He saw that how many times soever God might forgive the sins of a man, it would avail that man nothing unless he could forgive himself. He knew at last that in his own soul was fixed a gauge of right, unbending and implacable when wrong had been done, waiting to be reckoned with at the very last even though the great God should condone his sin. It seemed to him that, however surely his endowments took him through the gates of the Kingdom, with whatsoever power they raised him to dominion; even though he came into the Father's presence and sat a throne of his own by the side of Joseph and Brigham, that there would still ring in his ears the cries of those who had been murdered at the priesthood's command; that there would leap before his eyes fountains of blood from the breasts of living women who knelt and clung to the knees of their slayers—to the knees of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; that he would see two spots of white in the dim light of a morning where the two little girls lay who had been sent for water; that he would see the two boys taken out to the desert, one to die at once, the other to wander to a slower death; that before his sinful eyes would come the dying face of the woman who had loved him and lost her soul rather than betray him. He knew that, even in celestial realms exalted beyond the highest visions of their priesthood, his soul would still burn in this fire that he could not extinguish within his own breast. He knew that he carried hell as an inseparable part of himself, and that the forgiveness of no other power could avail him. He no longer feared God, but himself alone.

From this fire of his own building it seemed to him that he could obtain surcease only by reducing the self within him. As surely as he let it feel a want, all the torture came back upon him. When his pride lifted up its head, when he desired any satisfaction for himself, when he was tempted for a moment to lay down his cross, the cries came back, the sea of blood surged before him, and close behind came the shapes that crawled or moved furtively, ever about to spring in front and turn upon him. Small wonder, then, that his shoulders bent beneath unseen burdens, that his air was of one who suffered for all the world, and that they called him "the little man of sorrows."

With this knowledge he learned to permit himself only one great love, a love for the child Prudence. He was sure that no punishment could come through that. It was his day-star and his life, the one pleasure that brought no suffering with it. She was a child of fourteen now, a half-wild, firm-fleshed, glowing creature of the out-of-doors, who had lost with her baby softness all her resemblance to her mother. Her hair and eyes had darkened as she grew, and she was to be a larger woman, graver, deeper, more reserved; perhaps better calculated for the Kingdom by reason of a more reflective mind. He adored her, and was awed by her even when he taught her the truths of revealed religion. He closed his eyes at night upon a never-ending prayer for her soul; and opened them each day to a love of her that grew insidiously to enthrall him while he was all unconscious of its power—even while he knew with an awful certainty that he must have no treasure of his own which he could not willingly relinquish at the first call. She, in turn, loved and confided in her father, the shy, bent, shrunken little man with the smile.

"He always smiles as if he'd hurt himself and didn't want to show it before company," were the words in which she announced one of her early discoveries about him. But she liked and ruled him, and came to him for comfort when she was hurt or when Lorena scolded. For the third wife did not hesitate to characterise the child as "ready-made sin," and to declare that it took all her spare time, "and a lot that ain't spare," to neat up the house after her. "And her paw—though Lord knows who her maw was—a-dressing her to beat the cars; while he ain't never made over me since the blessed day I married him—not that much! But, thank heavens, it can't last very long, with the Son of Man already started, like you might say."



CHAPTER XXIX.

The Wild Ram of the Mountains Offers to Become a Saviour on Mount Zion

In the valley of which Amalon was the centre, they made ready for the end of the world. It is true that in the north, as the appointed year drew nigh, an opinion had begun to prevail that the Son of Man might defer his coming; and presently it became known that Brigham himself was doubtful about the year 1870, and was inspiring others to doubt. But in Amalon they were untainted by this heresy, choosing to rely upon what Brigham had said in moments more inspired.

He had taught that Joseph was to be the first person resurrected; that after his frame had been knit together and clothed with immortal flesh he would resurrect those who had died in the faith, according to their rank in the priesthood; then all his wives and children. Resurrected Elders, having had the keys of the resurrection conferred upon them by Joseph, would in turn call from the grave their own households; and when the last of the faithful had come forth, another great work would be performed; the Gentiles would then be resurrected to act as servants and slaves to the Saints. In his lighter moments Brigham had been wont to name a couple of Presidents of the United States who would then act as his valets.

Some doubt had been expressed that the earth's surface could contain the resurrected host, but Apostle Orson Pratt had removed this. He cited the prophet who had foretold that the hills should be laid low, the valleys exalted, and the crooked places made straight. With the earth thus free of mountains and waste places, he had demonstrated that there would be an acre and a quarter of ground for each Saint that had ever lived from the morning of creation to the day of doom. And, lest some carping mathematician should dispute his figures, he had declared that if, by any miscalculation, the earth's surface should not suffice for the Saints and their Gentile slaves, the Lord "would build a gallery around the earth." Thus had confusion been brought to the last quibbler in Zion.

It was this earlier teaching that the faithful of Amalon clung to, perhaps not a little by reason that immediately over them was a spiritual guide who had been trained from infancy to know that salvation lay in belief,—never in doubt. For a sign of the end they believed that on the night before the day of it there would be no darkness. This would be as it had been before the birth of the Saviour, as told in the Book of Mormon: "At the going down of the sun there was no darkness, and the people began to be astonished because there was no darkness when the night came; and there was no darkness in all that night, but it was as light as if it were midday."

They talked of little but this matter in that small pocket of the intermountain commonwealth, in Sabbath meetings and around the hearths at night. The Wild Ram of the Mountains thought all proselyting should cease in view of the approaching end; that the Elders on mission should withdraw from the vineyard, shake the dust from their feet, and seal up the rebellious Gentiles to damnation. To this Elder Beil Wardle had replied, somewhat testily:

"Well, now, since these valleys of Ephraim have got a little fattened a whole lot of us have got the sweeny, and our skins are growing too tight on our flesh." He had been unable to comprehend that the Gentiles were a rejected lot, the lost sheep of the house of Israel. On this occasion it had required all the tact of Elder Rae to soothe the two good men into an amiable discussion of the time when Sidney Rigdon went to the third heaven and talked face to face with God. They had agreed in the end, however, that they were both of the royal seed of Abraham, and were on the grand turnpike to exaltation.

To these discussions and sermons the child, Prudence, listened with intense interest, looking forward to the last day as an occasion productive of excitement even superior to that of her trips to Salt Lake City, where her father went to attend the October conference, and where she was taken to the theatre.

Of any world outside the valley she knew but little. Somewhere, far over to the east, was a handful of lost souls for whom she sometimes indulged in a sort of luxurious pity. But their loss, after all, was a part of the divine plan, and they would have the privilege of serving the glorified Saints, even though they were denied Godhood. She half-believed that even this mission of service was almost more of glory than they merited; for, in the phrasing of Bishop Wright, they "made a hell all the time and raised devils to keep it going." They had slain the Prophets of the Lord and hunted his people, and the best of them were lucky, indeed, to escape the fire that burns unceasingly; a fire hotter than any made by beech or hickory. Still she sometimes wondered if there were girls among them like her; and she had visions of herself as an angel of light, going down to them with the precious message of the Book of Mormon, and bringing them into the fold.

One day in this spring when she was fourteen, the good Bishop Wright, on his way down from Box Canon with a load of wood, saw her striding up the road ahead of him. Something caught his eye, either in her step which had a child's careless freedom, or in the lines of her swinging figure that told of coming womanhood, or in the flashing, laughing appeal of her dark eyes where for the moment both woman and child looked out. He set the brake on his wagon and waited for her to pass. She came by with a smile and a word of greeting, to which his rapt attention prevented any reply except a slight nod. When she had passed, he turned and looked after her until she had gone around the little hill on the road that entered the canon.

After the early evening meal that day, along the many-roomed house of this good man, from door to door there ran the words, starting from her who had last been sealed to him:

"He's making himself all proud!"

They knew what it meant, and wondered whom.

A little later the Bishop set out, his face clean-shaven to the ruffle of white whisker that ran under his chin from ear to ear, his scant hair smooth and shining with grease from the largest bear ever trapped in the Pine Mountains, and his tall form arrayed in his best suit of homespun. As he went he trolled an ancient lay of love, and youth was in his step. For there had come all day upon this Prince of Israel those subtle essences distilled by spring to provoke the mating urge. At the Rae house he found only Christina.

"Where's Brother Joel, Sister Rae?"

"Himself has gone out there," Christina had answered with a wave of her hand, and using the term of respect which she always applied to her husband.

He went around the house, out past the stable and corrals and across the irrigating ditch to where he saw Joel Rae leaning on the rail fence about the peach orchard. Far down between two rows of the blossoming trees he could see the girl reaching up to break off a pink-sprayed bough. He quickened his pace and was soon at the fence.

"Brother Joel,—I—the—"

The good man had been full of his message a moment before, but now he stammered and hesitated because of something cold in the other's eye as it seemed to note the unwonted elegance of his attire. He took a quick breath and went on.

"You see the Lord has moved me to add another star to my crown."

"I see; and you have come to get me to seal you?"

"Well, of course I hadn't thought of it so soon, but if you want to do it to-night—"

"As soon as you like, Bishop,—the sooner the better if you are to save the soul of another woman against the day of desolation. Where is she?" and he turned to go back to the house. But the Bishop still paused, looking toward the orchard.

"Well, the fact is, Brother Joel, you see the Lord has made me feel to have Prudence for another star in my crown of glory—your daughter Prudence," he repeated as the other gazed at him with a sudden change of manner.

"My daughter Prudence—little Prue—that child—that baby?"

"Baby?—she's fourteen; she was telling my daughter Mattie so jest the other day, and the Legislatur has made the marrying age twelve for girls and fifteen for boys, so she's two years overtime already. Of course, I ain't fifteen, but I'm safer for her than some young cub."

"But Bishop—you don't consider—"

"Oh, of course, I know there's been private talk about her; nobody knows who her mother was, and they say whoever she was you was never married to her, so she couldn't have been born right, but I ain't bigoted like some I could name, and I stand ready to be her Saviour on Mount Zion."

He waited with something of noble concession in his mien.

The other seemed only now to have fully sensed the proposal, and, with real terror in his face, he began to urge the Bishop toward the house, after looking anxiously back to where the child still lingered with the mist of pink blossoms against the leafless boughs above her.

"Come, Brother Seth—come, I beg of you—we'll talk of it—but it can't be, indeed it can't!"

"Let's ask her," suggested the Bishop, disinclined to move.

"Don't, don't ask her!" He seized the other by the arm.

"Come, I'll explain; don't ask her now, at any rate—I beg of you as a gentleman—as a gentleman, for you are a gentleman."

The Bishop turned somewhat impatiently, then remarked with a dignified severity:

"Oh, I can be a gentleman whenever it's necessary!"

They went across the fields toward the house, and the Bishop spoke further.

"There ain't any need to get into your high-heeled boots, Brother Rae, jest because I was aiming to save her to a crown of glory,—a girl that's thought to have been born on the wrong side of the blanket!"

They stopped by the first corral, and Joel Rae talked. He talked rapidly and with power, saying many things to make it plain that he was determined not to look upon the Wild Ram of the Mountains as an acceptable son-in-law. His manner was excited and distraught, terrified and indignant,—a manner hardly justified by the circumstances, about which there was nothing extraordinary, nothing not pleasing to God and in conformity to His revealed word. Bishop Wright indeed was puzzled to account for the heat of his manner, and in recounting the interview later to Elder Wardle, he threw out an intimation about strong drink. "To tell you the truth," he said, "I suspicion he'd jest been putting a new faucet in the cider barrel."

When Prudence came in from the blossoming peach-trees that night her father called her to him to sit on his lap in the dusk while the crickets sang, and grow sleepy as had been her baby habit.

"What did Bishop Wright want?" she asked, after her head was pillowed on his arm. Relieved that it was over, now even a little amused, he told her:

"He wanted to take my little girl away, to marry her."

She was silent for a moment, and then:

"Wouldn't that be fine, and we could build each other up in the Kingdom."

He held her tighter.

"Surely, child, you couldn't marry him?"

"But of course I could! Isn't he tried in the Kingdom, so he is sure to have all those thrones and dominions and power?"

"But child, child! That old man with all his wives—"

"But they say old men are safer than young men. Young men are not tried in the Kingdom. I shouldn't like a young husband anyway—they always want to play rough games, and pull your hair, and take things away from you, and get in the way."

"But, baby,—don't, don't—"

"Why, you silly father, your voice sounds as if you were almost crying—please don't hold me so tight—and some one must save me before the Son of Man comes to judge the quick and the dead; you know a woman can't be saved alone. I think Bishop Wright would make a fine husband, and I should have Mattie Wright to play with every day."

"And you would leave me?"

"Why, that's so, Daddy! I never thought—of course I can't leave my little sorry father—not yet. I forgot that. I couldn't leave you. Now tell me about my mother again."

He told her the story she already knew so well—how beautiful her mother was, the look of her hair and eyes, her slenderness, the music of her voice, and the gladness of her laugh.

"And won't she be glad to see us again. And she will come before Christina and Lorena, because she was your first wife, wasn't she?"

He was awake all night in a fever of doubt and rebellion. By the light of the candle, he read in the book of Mormon passages that had often puzzled but never troubled him until now when they were brought home to him; such as, "And now it came to pass that the people Nephi under the reign of the second king began to grow hard in their hearts, and indulged themselves somewhat in wicked practises, like unto David of old, desiring many wives—"

Again he read, "Behold, David and Solomon truly had many wives, which thing was abominable before me, saith the Lord."

Still again, "For there shall not be any man among you have save it shall be one wife."

Then he turned to the revelation on celestial marriage given years after these words were written, and in the first paragraph read:

"Verily, thus saith the Lord unto you my servant Joseph, that inasmuch as you have inquired of my hand to know and understand wherein I, the Lord, justified my servants Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, as also Moses, David, and Solomon, my servants, as touching the principle and doctrine of their having many wives—"

He turned from one to the other; from the many explicit admonitions and commands against polygamy, the denunciations of the patriarchs for their indulgence in the practise, to this last passage contradicting the others, and vexed himself with wonder. In the Book of Mormon, David was said to be wicked for doing this thing. Now in the revelation to Joseph he read, "David's wives were given unto him of me, by the hand of Nathan, my servant."

He recalled old tales that were told in Nauvoo by wicked apostates and the basest of Gentile scandalmongers; how that Joseph in the day of his great power had suffered the purity of his first faith to become tainted; how his wife, Emma, had upbraided him so harshly for his sins that he, fearing disgrace, had put out this revelation as the word of God to silence her. He remembered that these gossips had said the revelation itself proved that Joseph had already done, before he received it, that which it commanded him to do, citing the clause, "And let my handmaid, Emma Smith, receive all those that have been given unto my servant Joseph, and who are virtuous and pure before me."

They had gossiped further, that still fearing her rebellion, he had worded a threat for her in the next clause, "And I command my handmaid, Emma Smith, to abide and cleave unto my servant Joseph and to none else. But if she will not abide this commandment she shall be destroyed, saith the Lord; for I am the Lord thy God, and will destroy her if she abide not in my law ... and again verily I say, let mine handmaid forgive my servant Joseph his trespasses and then shall she be forgiven her trespasses."

This was the calumny the Gentile gossips back in Nauvoo would have had the world believe,—that this great doctrine of the Church had been given to silence the enraged wife of a man detected in sin.

But in the midst of his questionings he seemed to see a truth,—that another snare had been set for him by the Devil, and that this time it had caught his feet. He, who knew that he must have nothing for himself, had all unconsciously so set his heart upon this child of her mother that he could not give her up. And now so fixed and so great was his love that he could not turn back. He knew he was lost. To cling to her would be to question, doubt, and to lose his faith. To give her up would kill him.

But at least for a little while he could put it off.



CHAPTER XXX.

How the World Did not Come to an End

In doubt and fear, the phantom of a dreadful certainty creeping always closer, the final years went by. When the world came to be in its very last days, when the little bent man was drooping lower than ever, and Prudence was seventeen, there came another Prince of Israel to save her into the Kingdom while there was yet a time of grace. On this occasion the suitor was no less a personage than Bishop Warren Snow, a holy man and puissant, upon whom the blessed Gods had abundantly manifested their favour. In wives and children, in flocks and herds, he was rich; while, as to spiritual worth, had not that early church poet styled him the Entablature of Truth?

But Prudence Rae, once so willing to be saved by the excellent Wild Ram of the Mountains, had fled in laughing confusion from this later benefactor, when he had made plain one day the service he sought to do her soul. A moment later he had stood before her father in all his years of patriarchal dignity, hale, ruddy, and vast of girth.

"She's a woman now, Brother Snow,—free to choose for herself," the father had replied to his first expostulations.

"Counsel her, Brother Rae." In the mind of the Bishop, "counsel," properly applied, was a thing not long to be resisted.

"She would treat my counsel as shortly as she treated your proposal, Brother Snow."

The Entablature of Truth glanced out of the open door to where Tom Potwin could be seen, hastening importantly upon his endless and mysterious errands, starting off abruptly a little way, stopping suddenly, with one hand raised to his head, as if at that instant remembering a forgotten detail, and then turning with new impetus to walk swiftly in the opposite direction.

"There ain't any one else after her, is there, Brother Rae,—any of these young boys?"

"No, Bishop—no one."

"Well, if there is, you let me know. I'll be back again, Brother Rae. Meantime, counsel her—counsel her with authority."

The Entablature of Truth had departed with certain little sidewise noddings of his head that seemed to indicate an unalterable purpose.

The girl came to her father, blushing and still laughing confusedly, when the rejected one had mounted his horse and ridden away.

"Oh, Daddy, how funny!—to think of marrying him!"

He looked at her anxiously. "But you wanted to marry Bishop Wright—at least, you—"

She laughed again. "How long ago—years ago—I must have been a baby."

"You were old enough to point out that he would save you in the after-time."

"I remember; I could see myself sitting by him on a throne, with the Saints all around us on other thrones, and the Gentiles kneeling to serve us. We were in a big palace that had a hundred closets in it, and in every closet there hung a silk dress for me—a hundred silk dresses, each a different colour, waiting for me to wear them."

"But have you thought sufficiently—now? The time is short. Bishop Snow could save you."

"Yes—but he would kiss me—he wanted to just now." She put both hands over her mouth, with a mocking little grimace that the Entablature of Truth would not have liked to see.

"He would be certain to exalt you."

She took the hands away long enough to say, "He would be certain to kiss me."

"You may be lost."

"I'd rather!"

And so it had ended between them. Ever since a memorable visit to Salt Lake City, where she had gone to the theatre, she had cherished some entirely novel ideas concerning matrimony. In that fairyland of delights she had beheld the lover strangely wooing but one mistress, the husband strangely cherishing but one wife. There had been no talk of "the Kingdom," and no home portrayed where there were many wives. That lover, swearing to cherish but one woman for ever, had thrilled her to new conceptions of her own womanhood, had seemed to meet some need of her own heart that she had not until then been conscious of. Ever after, she had cherished this ideal of the stage, and refused to consider the other. Yet she had told her father nothing of this, for with her womanhood had come a new reserve—truths half-divined and others clearly perceived—which she could not tell any one.

He, in turn, now kept secret from her the delight he felt at her refusal. He had tried conscientiously to persuade her into the path of salvation, when his every word was a blade to cut at his heart. Nor was he happy when she refused so definitely the saving hand extended to her. To know she was to come short of her glory in the after-time was anguish to him; and mingling with that anguish, inflaming and aggravating it, were his own heretical doubts that would not be gone.

In a sheer desperation of bewilderment he longed for the end, longed to know certainly his own fate and hers—to have them irrevocably fixed—so that he might no more be torn among many minds, but could begin to pay his own penalties in plain suffering, uncomplicated by this torturing necessity to choose between two courses of action.

And the time was, happily, to be short. With the first day of 1870 he began to wait. With prayer and fasting and vigils he waited. Now was the day when the earth should be purified by fire, the wicked swept from the land, and the lost tribes of Israel restored to their own. Now was to come the Son of Man who should dwell in righteousness with men, reigning over them on the purified earth for a thousand years.

He watched the mild winter go, with easy faith; and the early spring come and go, with a dawning uneasiness. For the time was passing with never the blast of a trumpet from the heavens. He began to see then that he alone, of all Amalon, had kept his faith pure. For the others had foolishly sown their fields, as if another crop were to be harvested,—as if they must continue to eat bread that was earth-grown. Even Prudence had strangely ceased to believe as he did. Something from the outside had come, he knew not what nor how, to tarnish the fair gold of her certainty. She had not said so, but he divined it when he shrewdly observed that she was seeking to comfort him, to support his own faith when day after day the Son of Man came not.

"It will surely be in another month, Daddy—perhaps next week—perhaps to-morrow," she would say cheerfully. "And you did right not to put in any crops. It would have been wicked to doubt."

He quickly detected her insincerity, seeing that she did not at all believe. As the summer came and went without a sign from the heavens, she became more positive and more constant in these assurances. As the evening drew on, they would walk out along the unsown fields, now grown rankly to weeds, to where the valley fell away from their feet to the west. There they could look over line after line of hills, each a little dimmer as it lay farther into the blue through which they saw it, from the bold rim of the nearest shaggy-sided hill to the farthest feathery profile all but lost in the haze. Day after day they sat together here and waited for the sign,—for the going down of the sun upon a night when there should be no darkness; when the light should stay until the sun came back over the eastern verge; when the trumpet should wind through the hills, and when the little man's perplexities, if not his punishment, should be at an end.

And always when the dusk came she would try to cheer him to new hope for the next night, counting the months that remained in the year, the little time within which the great white day must be. Then they would go back through the soft light of the afterglow, he with his bent shoulders and fallen face, shrunk and burned out, except for the eyes, and she in the first buoyant flush of her womanhood, free and strong and vital, a thing of warmth and colour and luring curve, restraining her quick young step to his, as she suppressed now a world of strange new fancies to his soberer way of thought. When they reached home again, her words always were: "Never mind, Daddy—it must come soon—there's only a little time left in the year."

It was on these occasions that he knew she was now the stronger, that he was leaning on her, had, in fact, long made her his support—fearfully, lest she be snatched away. And he knew at last that another change had come with her years; that she no longer confided in him unreservedly, as the little child had. He knew there were things now she could not give him. She communed with herself, and her silences had come between them. She looked past him at unseen forms, and listened as if for echoes that she alone could hear, waiting and wanting, knowing not her wants—yet driven to aloofness by them from the little bent man of sorrows, whose whole life she had now become.

His hope lasted hardly until the year ended. Before the time was over, there had crept into his mind a conviction that the Son of Man would not come; that the Lord's favour had been withdrawn from Israel. He knew the cause,—the shedding of innocent blood. They might have made war; indeed, many of the revelations to Joseph discriminated even between murder and that murder in which innocent blood should be shed; but the truth was plain. They had shed innocent blood that day in the Meadows. Now the Lord's favour was withdrawn and His coming deferred, perhaps another thousand years. The torture of the thing came back to him with all its early colouring, so that his days and nights were full of anguish. He no longer dared open the Bible to that reddened page. The cries already rang in his ears, and he knew not what worse torture might come if he looked again upon the stain; nor could he free himself from these by the old expedient of prayer, for he could no longer pray with an honest heart; he was no longer unselfish, could no longer kneel in perfect submission; he was wholly bound to this child of her mother, and the peace of absolute and utter sacrifice could not come back to him. Full of unrest, feeling that somehow the end, at least for him, could not be far off, he went north to the April Conference. He took Prudence with him, not daring to leave her behind.

She went with high hopes, alive with new sensations. Another world lay outside her valley of the mountains, and she was going to peep over the edge at its manifold fascinations. She had been there before as a child; now she was going as a woman. She remembered the city, bigger and grander than fifty Amalons, with magnificent stores filled with exotic novelties and fearsome luxuries from the land of the wicked Gentile. She recalled even the strange advertisements and signs, from John and Enoch Reese, with "All necessary articles of comfort for the wayfarer, such as flour, hard bread, butter, eggs and vinegar, buckskin pants and whip-lashes," to the "Surgeon Dentist from Berlin and Liverpool," who would "Examine and Extract Teeth, besides keeping constantly on hand a supply of the Best Matches, made by himself." From William Hennefer, announcing that, "In Connection with my Barber Shop, I have just opened an Eating House, where Patrons will be Accommodated with every Edible Luxury the Valley Affords," to William Nixon, who sold goods for cash, flour, or wheat "at Jacob Hautz's house on the southeast corner of Council-House Street and Emigration Square, opposite to Mr. Orson Spencer's."

She remembered the hunters and trappers in bedraggled buckskin, the plainsmen with revolvers in their belts, wearing the blue army cloak, the teamsters in leathern suits, and horsemen in fur coats and caps, buffalo-hide boots with the hair outside, and rolls of blankets behind their high Mexican saddles.

More fondly did she recall two wonderful evenings at the theatre. First had been the thrilling "Robert Macaire," then the romantic "Pizarro," in which Rolla had been a being of such overwhelming beauty that she had felt he could not be of earth.

This time her visit was an endless fever of discovery in a realm of magic and mystery, of joys she had supposed were held in reserve for those who went behind the veil. It was a new and greater city she came to now, where were buildings of undreamed splendour, many of them reaching dizzily three stories above the earth. And the shops were more fascinating than ever. She still shuddered at the wickedness of the Gentiles, but with a certain secret respect for their habits of luxury and their profusion of devices for adornment.

And there were strange new faces to be seen, people surely of a different world, of a different manner from those she had known, wearing, with apparent carelessness, garments even more strangely elegant than those in the shop windows, and speaking in strange, soft accents. She was told that these were Gentiles, tourists across the continent, who had ventured from Ogden to observe the wonders of the new Zion. The thought of the railroad was in itself thrilling. To be so near that wonderful highway to the land of the evil-doers and to a land, alas! of so many strange delights. She shuddered at her own wickedness, but fell again and again, and was held in bondage by the allurements about her. So thrilled to her soul's center was she that the pleasure of it hurt her, and the tears would come to her eyes until she felt she must be alone to cry for the awful joy of it.

The evening brought still more to endure, for they went to the play. It was a play that took her out of herself, so that the crowd was lost to her from the moment the curtain went up in obedience to a little bell that tinkled mysteriously,—either back on the stage or in her own heart, she was not sure which.

It was a love story; again that strangely moving love of one man for one woman, that seemed as sweet as it was novel to her. But there was war between the houses in the play, and the young lover had to make a way to see his beloved, climbing a high wall into her garden, climbing to her very balcony by a scarf she flung down to him. To the young woman from Amalon, these lovers' voices came with a strange compulsion, so that they played with her heart between them. She was in turn the youth, pleading in a voice that touched every heart string from low to high; then she was the woman, soft and timid, hesitating in moments of delicious doubt, yet almost fearful of her power to resist, —half-wishing to be persuaded, half-frightened lest she yield.

When the moment of surrender came, she became both of them; and, when they parted, it was as if her heart went in twain, a half with each, both to ache until they were reunited. Between the acts she awoke to reality, only to say to herself: "So much I shall have to think about—so much—I shall never be able to think about it enough."

Feverishly she followed the heart-breaking tragedy to its close, suffering poignantly the grief of each lover, suffering death for each, and feeling her life desolated when the end came.

But then the dull curtain shut her back into her own little world, where there was no love like that, and beside the little bent man she went out into the night.

The next morning had come a further delight, an invitation to a ball from Brigham. Most of the day was spent in one of the shops, choosing a gown of wondrous beauty, and having it fitted to her.



When she looked into the little cracked mirror that night, she saw a strange new face and figure; and, when she entered the ballroom, she felt that others noted the same strangeness, for many looked at her until she felt her cheeks burn. Then Brigham arose from a sofa, where he had been sitting with his first wife and his last. He came gallantly toward her; Brigham, whom she knew to be the most favoured of God on earth and the absolute ruler of all the realm about her—an affable, unpretentious yet dignified gentleman of seventy, who took her hand warmly in both his own, looked her over with his kindly blue eyes, and welcomed her to Zion in words of a fatherly gentleness. Later, when he had danced with some of his wives, Brigham came to dance with her, light of foot and full of zest for the measure as any youth.

Others danced with her, but during it all she kept finding herself back before the magic square that framed the land where a man loved but one woman. She remembered that Brigham sat with four of his wives in one of the boxes, enthusiastically applauding that portrayal of a single love. As the picture came back to her now, there seemed to have been something incongruous in this spectacle. She observed the seamed and hardened features of his earliest wife, who kept to the sofa during the evening, beside the better favoured Amelia, whom the good man had last married, and she thought of his score or so of wives between them.

Then she knew that what she had seen the night before had been the truth; that she could love no man who did not love her alone. She tried to imagine the lover in the play going from balcony to balcony, sighing the same impassioned love-tale to woman after woman; or to imagine him with many wives at home, to whom would be taken the news of his death in the tomb of his last. So she thought of the play and not of the ball, stepping the dances absently, and, when it was all over, she fell asleep, rejoicing that, before their death, the two dear lovers had been sealed for time and eternity, so that they could awaken together in the Kingdom.

They went home the next day, driving down the valley that rolled in billows of green between the broken ranges of the Wasatch and the Oquirrh. It was no longer of the Kingdom she thought, nor of Brigham and his wives; only of a clean-limbed youth in doublet and hose, a plumed cap, and a silken cloak, who, in a voice that brought the tears back of her eyes, told of his undying love for one woman—and of the soft, tender woman in the moonlight, who had trusted him and let herself go to him in life and in death.

The world had not ended. She thought that, in truth, it could not have ended yet; for had she not a life to live?



CHAPTER XXXI.

The Lion of the Lord Sends an Order

They reached home in very different states of mind. The girl was eager for the solitude of her favourite nook in the canon, where she could dream in peace of the wonderland she had glimpsed; but the little bent man was stirred by dread and chilled with forebodings. To him, as well as to the girl, the change in the first city of Zion had been a thing to wonder at. But what had thrilled her with amazed delight brought pain to him. Zion was no longer held inviolate.

And now the truth was much clearer to him. Not only had the Lord deferred His coming, but He had set His hand again to scatter Israel for its sin. Instead of letting them stay alone in their mountain retreat until the beginning of His reign on earth, He had brought the Gentiles upon them in overwhelming numbers. Where once a thousand miles of wilderness lay between them and Gentile wickedness, they were now hemmed about with it, and even it polluted the streets of the holy city itself.