_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.