“Thank you, Brother—­I’m just up from the fever-bed—­they shaved my head for it—­and so I lost my hat—­thank you—­here we shall be warm if only the sun comes out.”

Joel went back to help on others who came, a feeble, bedraggled dozen or so that had clung despairingly to their only shelter until they were driven out.

“You can stay here in safety, you know, if you renounce Joseph Smith and his works—­they will give you food and shelter.”  He repeated it to each little group of the dispirited wretches as they staggered past him, but they replied staunchly by word or look, and one man, in the throes of a chill, swung his cap and uttered a feeble “Hurrah for the new Zion!”

When they were all on with their meagre belongings, he called again to the man in the wagon.

“Brother Keaton, my father went across, did he?”

Several of the men on shore answered him.

“Yes”—­“Old white-whiskered death’s-head went over the river”—­“Over here”—­“A sassy old codger he was”—­“He got his needings, too”—­“Got his needings—­”

They cast off the line and the oars began to dip.

“And you’ll get your needings, too, if you come back, remember that!  That’s the last of you, and we’ll have no more vermin like you.  Now see what old Joe Smith, the white-hat prophet, can do for you in the Indian territory!”

He stood at the stern of the boat, shivering as he looked at the current, swift, cold, and gray under the sunless sky.  He feared some indignity had been offered to his father.  They had looked at one another queerly when they answered his questions.  He went forward to the wagon again.

“Brother Keaton, you’re sure my father is all right?”

“I am sure he’s all right, Brother Rae.”

Content with this, at last, he watched the farther flat shore of the Mississippi, with its low fringe of green along the edge, where they were to land and be at last out of the mob’s reach.  He repeated his father’s words:  “Thank God, they’re like all snakes; they can’t jump beyond their own length.”

The confusion of landing and the preparations for an immediate start drove for the time all other thoughts from his mind.  It had been determined to get the little band at once out of the marshy spot where the camp had been made.  The teams were soon hitched, the wagons loaded, and the train ready to move.  He surveyed it, a hundred poor wagons, many of them without cover, loaded to the full with such nondescript belongings as a house-dwelling people, suddenly put out on the open road, would hurriedly snatch as they fled.  And the people made his heart ache, even to the deadening of his own sorrow, as he noted their wobegoneness.  For these were the sick, the infirm, the poor, the inefficient, who had been unable for one reason or another to migrate with the main body of the Saints earlier in the season.  Many of them were now racked by fever from sleeping on the damp ground.  These bade fair not to outlast some of the lumbering carts that threatened at every rough spot to jolt apart.