Before locking the doors of their houses for the last time, they strewed shavings, straw, and other combustibles through the rooms so that the work of firing the city could be done quickly.  A score of men were left behind to apply the torch the moment it became necessary,—­should a gate be swung open or a latch lifted by hostile hands.  Their homes and fields and orchards might be given back to the desert from which they had been won; but never to the Gentile invaders.

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

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

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

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

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

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