For an instant, she looked such warm, almost indignant approval that he believed she was about to express an opinion of her own in the matter, but she stayed silent, looking away instead with a little movement of having swallowed something.

“And you, too, if you were my sister, do you think I’d want you married to a man who’d begin to look around for some one else as soon as he got you?  No, sir—­you deserve some decent young fellow who’d love you all to pieces day in and day out and never so much as look at this little yellow-haired girl—­even if she was almost as pretty as you.”

But she was not to be led into rendering any hasty decision which might affect his eternal salvation.  Moreover, she was embarrassed and disturbed.

“We must go,” she said, rising before he could help her.  When they had picked their way down to the mouth of the canon, he walking behind her, she turned back and said, “Of course you could marry that little yellow-haired girl with the blue eyes first, the one you’re thinking so much about—­the little short, fat thing with a doll-baby face—­”

But he only answered, “Oh, well, if you get me into your Church it wouldn’t make a bit of difference whether I took her first or second.”

CHAPTER XXXIX.

A Revelation Concerning the True Order of Marriage

While matters of theology and consanguinity were being debated in Box Canon, the little bent man down in the first house to the left, in his struggle to free himself, was tightening the meshes of his fate about him.  In his harried mind he had formed one great resolution.  He believed that a revelation had come to him.  It seemed to press upon him as the culmination of all the days of his distress.  He could see now that he had felt it years before, when he first met the wife of Elder Tench, the gaunt, gray woman, toiling along the dusty road; and again when he had found the imbecile boy turning upon his tormentors.  A hundred times it had quickened within him.  And it had gained in force steadily, until to-day, when it was overwhelming him.  Now that his flesh was wasted, it seemed that his spirit could see far.

His great discovery was that the revelation upon celestial marriage given to Joseph Smith had been “from beneath,”—­a trick of Satan to corrupt them.  Not only did it flatly contradict earlier revelations, but the very Book of Mormon itself declared again and again that polygamy was wickedness.  Joseph had been duped by the powers of darkness, and all Israel had sinned in consequence.  Upon the golden plates delivered to him, concerning the divine source of which there could be no doubt, this order of marriage had been repeatedly condemned and forbidden.  But as to the revelation which sanctioned it there could rightly be doubt; for had not Joseph himself once warned them that “some revelations are from God, some from men, and some from the Devil.”  Either the Book of Mormon was not inspired, or the revelation was not from God, since they were fatally in opposition.