“These women must be killed, too?”

“That’s the orders from headquarters, Brother Rae.”

“From the military headquarters at Parowan, or from the spiritual headquarters at Salt Lake?”

“Better not inquire how far back that order started, Brother Rae—­not of me, anyway.”

“But women and children—­”

“The great Elohim has spoken from the heavens, Brother Rae—­that’s enough for me.  I can’t put my human standards against the revealed will of God.”

“But women and children—­” He repeated the words as if he sought to comprehend them.  He seemed like a man with defective sight who has come suddenly against a wall that he had thought far off.  Higbee now addressed him.

“Brother Rae, in religion you have to eat the bran along with the flour.  Did you suppose we were going to milk the Gentiles and not ever shed any blood?”

“But innocent blood—­”

“There ain’t a drop of innocent blood in the whole damned train.  And what are you, to be questioning this way about orders from on high?  I’ve heard you preach many a time about the sin of such doings as that.  You preach in the pulpit about stubborn clay in the hands of the potter having to be put through the mill again, and now that you’re out here in the field, seems to me you get limber like a tallowed rag when an order comes along.”

“Defenseless women and little children—­” He was still trying to regain his lost equilibrium.  Lee now interposed.

“Yes, Brother Rae, as defenseless as that pretty sister of yours was in the woods there, that afternoon at Haun’s Mill.”

The reminder silenced him for the moment.  When he could listen again, he heard them canvassing a plan of attack that should succeed without endangering any of their own numbers.  He walked away from the group to see if alone, out of the tumult and torrent of lies and half-truths, he could not fetch some one great unmistakable truth which he felt instinctively was there.

And then his ears responded again to the slow chant and the constant measured beat of the flat-toned, vibrant drum.  Something in its rhythm searched and penetrated and swayed and seemed to overwhelm him.  It came as the measured, insistent beat of fate itself, relentless, inexorable; and all the time it was stirring in him vague, latent instincts of savagery.  He wished it would stop, so that he might reason, yet dreaded that it might stop at any moment.  Fascinated by the weird rhythm and the hollow beat, he could not summon the will to go beyond its sway.

He walked about the fires or lingered by the groups in consultation until the first signs of dawn.  Then he climbed the low, rocky hill to the east and peered over the top, the drum-beats still pulsing through him, still coercing him.  As the light grew, he could make out the details of the scene below.  He was looking down into a narrow valley running north and south, formed by two ranges of rugged, rocky hills five hundred yards or so apart.  To the north this valley widened; to the south it narrowed until it became a mere gap leading out into the desert.