“President Taylor you can’t praise,” he had gone on to the gradually whitening Brocchus.  “What was he?  A mere soldier with regular army buttons on—­no better to go at the head of troops than a dozen men I could pick up between Leavenworth and Laramie.  As to what you have intimated about our morals—­you miserable cringing coward, you—­I won’t notice it except to make my personal request of every brother and husband present not to give your back what your impudence deserves.  You talk of things you have on hearsay since you came among us.  I’ll talk of hearsay, then—­the hearsay that you are mad and will go home because we can’t make it worth your while to stay.  What it would satisfy you to get out of us it wouldn’t be hard to tell; but I know it’s more than you’ll get.  We don’t want you.  You are such a baby-calf that we would have to sugar your soap to coax you to wash yourself on Saturday night.  Go home to your mammy, straightaway, and the sooner the better.”

This was the manner, thought Joel Rae, that Federal officials should be treated when they were out of sympathy with Zion—­though he thought he might perhaps have chosen words that would be more dignified had the task been entrusted to him.  He told Brigham his satisfaction with the address when the excited congregation had dispersed, and the alarmed Brocchus had gone.

“That is the course we must take, Brother Brigham—­do more of it.  Unless we take our stand now against aggression, the Lord will surely smite us again with famine and pestilence.”  And Brigham had answered, in the tones of a man who knows, “Wait just a little!”

But there came famine upon them again; in punishment, declared Joel Rae, for their ungodly temporising with the minions of the United States government.  In ’54 the grasshoppers ate their growing crops.  In ’55 they came again with insatiate maws—­and on what they left the drought and frost worked their malignant spells.  The following winter great numbers of their cattle and sheep perished on the range in the heavy snows.

The spring of ’56 found them again digging roots and resorting to all the old pitiful makeshifts of famine.

“This,” declared Joel Rae, to the starving people, “is a judgment of Heaven upon us for permitting Gentile aggression.  It is meant to clench into our minds the God’s truth that we must stand by our faith with the arms of war if need be.”

“Brother Rae is just a little mite soul-proud,” Brigham thereupon confided to his counsellors, “and I wouldn’t wonder if the Lord would be glad to see some of it taken out of him.  Anyway, I’ve got a job for him that will just about do it.”

CHAPTER XIII.

Joel Rae Is Treated for Pride of Soul