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

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

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

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

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