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.