Brigham sent for him the next day and did him the honour to entrust to him an important mission.  He was to go back to the Missouri River and bring on one of the hand-cart parties that were to leave there that summer.  The three years of famine had left the Saints in the valley poor, so that the immigration fund was depleted.  The oncoming Saints, therefore, who were not able to pay their own way, were this summer, instead of riding in ox-carts, to walk across the plains and mountains, and push their belongings before them in hand-carts.  It had become Brigham’s pet scheme, and the Lord had revealed to him that it would work out auspiciously.  Joel prepared to obey, though it was not without aversion that he went again to the edge of the Gentile country.

He was full of bitterness while he was obliged to tarry on the banks of the Missouri.  The hatred of those who had persecuted him and his people, bred into him from boyhood, flashed up in his heart with more fire than ever.  Even when a late comer from Nauvoo told him that Prudence Corson had married Captain Girnway of the Carthage Grays, two years after the exodus from Nauvoo, his first feeling was one of blazing anger against the mobocrats rather than regret for his lost love.

“They moved down to Jackson County, Missouri, too,” concluded his informant, thus adding to the flame.  They had gone to set up their home in the very Zion that the Gentiles with so much bloodshed had wrested from the Saints.

Even when the first anger cooled and he could face the thing calmly in all its deeper aspects, he was still very bitter.  While he had stanchly kept himself for her, cherishing with a single heart all the old memories of her dearness, she had been a wife these seven years,—­the wife, moreover, of a mob-leader whose minions had put them out of their home, and then wantonly tossed his father like a dead branch into the waters.  She had loved this uniformed murderer—­his little Prue—­perhaps borne him children, while he, Joel Rae, had been all too scrupulously true to her memory, fighting against even the pleased look at a woman; fighting—­only the One above could know with what desperate valour—­against the warm-hearted girl with the gray eyes and the red lips, who laughed in her knowledge that she drew him—­fighting her away for a sentimental figment, until she had married another.

Now when he might have let himself turn to her, his heart freed of the image of that yellow-haired girl so long cherished, this other was the wife of Elder Pixley—­the fifth wife—­and an unloving wife as he knew.

She had sought him before the marriage, and there had been some wholly frank and simple talk between them.  It had ended by his advising her to marry Elder Pixley so that she might be saved into the Kingdom, and by her replying, with the old reckless laugh, a little dry and strained, and with the wonderful gray eyes full upon him,—­“Oh, I’ll marry him!  Small difference to me what man of them I marry at all,—­now!”