Then he was off into the desert, pacing swiftly into the grim, sandy solitude beyond the farthest cabin light and the bark of the outmost watch-dog.  Feverishly he walked, and far, until at last, as if naught in himself could avail, he threw himself to the ground and prayed.

“Keep me good!  Keep me to my vows!  Help me till my own strength grows, for I am weak and wanting.  Let me endure the pain until this wicked fire within me hath burned itself out.  Keep me for her!”

Back where the houses were, in the shadow of one of them, was the flushed, full-breathing woman, hurt but dumb, wondering, in her bruised tenderness, why it must be so.

Still farther back, inside the stockade, where the gossiping groups yet lingered, they were saying it was strange that Elder Rae waited so long to take him a wife or two.

CHAPTER XII.

A Fight for Life

The stream of Saints to the Great Basin had become well-nigh continuous—­Saints of all degrees of prosperity, from Parley Pratt, the Archer of Paradise, with his wealth of wives, wagons, and cattle, to Barney Bigler, unblessed with wives or herds, who put his earthly goods on a wheelbarrow, and, to the everlasting glory of God, trundled it from the Missouri River to the valley of the Great Salt Lake.  Train after train set out for the new Zion with faith that God would drop manna before them.

Each train was a little migrating State in itself.  And never was the natural readiness of the American pioneer more luminously displayed.  At every halt of the wagons a shoemaker would be seen searching for a lapstone; a gunsmith would be mending a rifle, and weavers would be at their wheels or looms.  The women early discovered that the jolting wagons would churn their cream to butter; and for bread, very soon after the halt was made, the oven hollowed out of the hillside was heated, and the dough, already raised, was in to bake.  One mother in Israel brought proudly to the Lake a piece of cloth, the wool for which she had sheared, dyed, spun, and woven during her march.

Nor did the marches ever cease to be fraught with peril and, hardship.  There were tempests, droughts, famines, stampedes of the stock, prairie fires, and Indian forays.  Hundreds of miles across the plain and through the mountains the Indians would trail after them, like sharks in the wake of a ship, tirelessly watching, waiting for the right moment to stampede the stock, to fire the prairie, or to descend upon stragglers.