He stood a moment, breathless and faint, looking with fearful eyes down at the little, limp, still figure at his feet.  One slender, bare arm was flung out as if she had grasped at the whole big earth in her last agony.

The spell of fear was broken by the boy, who came trotting up.  He had given way to his tears now, and was crying loudly from fright.  Joel made him take the little girl and sit under a cedar out of sight of the spot.

CHAPTER XVIII.

In the Dark of the Aftermath

He was never able to recall the events of that day, or of the months following, in anything like their proper sequence.  The effort to do so brought a pain shooting through his head.  Up to the moment when the yellow hair had waved in his face, everything had kept a ghastly distinctness.  He remembered each instant and each emotion.  After that all was dark confusion, with only here and there a detached, inconsequent memory of appalling vividness.

He could remember that he had buried her on the other side of the hill where a gnarled cedar grew at the foot of a ledge of sandstone, using a spade that an Indian had brought him from the deserted camp.  By her side he had found the scattered contents of the little bundle she had carried,—­a small Bible, a locket, a worn gold bracelet, and a picture of herself as he had known her, a half-faded daguerreotype set in a gilt oval, in a square rubber case that shut with a snap.  The little limp-backed Bible had lain flung open on the ground in the midst of the other trinkets.  He remembered picking these things up and retying them in the blue silk handkerchief, and then he had twice driven away an Indian who, finding no other life, came up to kill the two children huddled at the foot of the cedar.

He recalled that he had at some time passed the two wagons; one of them was full of children, some crying, some strangely quiet and observant.  The other contained the wounded men whom Lee and the two drivers had dispatched where they lay.

He remembered the scene close about him where many of the women and older children had fallen under knife and tomahawk.  At intervals had come a long-drawn scream, terrifying in its shrillness, from some woman struggling with Saint or savage.

Later he remembered becoming aware that the bodies were being stripped and plundered; of seeing Lee holding his big white hat for valuables, while half a dozen men searched pockets and stripped off clothing.  The picture of the naked bodies of a dozen well-grown children tangled in one heap stayed with him.

Still later, when the last body had been stripped and the smaller treasures collected, he had known that these and the stock and wagons were being divided between the Mormons and the Indians; a conflict with these allies being barely averted, the Indians accusing the Saints of withholding more than their share of the plunder.