After the division was made he knew that the Saints had all been called together to take an oath that the thing should be kept secret.  He knew, too, that he had gone over the spot that night, the moon lighting the naked forms strewn about.  Many of them lay in attitudes strangely lifelike,—­here one resting its head upon its arm, there a white face falling easily back as if it looked up at the stars.  He could not recall why he had gone back, unless to be sure that he had made the grave under the cedar secure from the wolves.

Some of the men had camped on the spot.  Others had gone to Hamblin’s ranch, near the Meadows, where the children were taken.  He had sent the boy there with them, and he could recall distinctly the struggle he had with the little fellow; for the boy had wished not to be taken from the girl, and had fought valiantly with fists and feet and his sharp little teeth.  The little girl with her mother’s bundle he had taken to another ranch farther south in the Pine Mountains.  He told the woman the child was his own, and that she was to be kept until he came again.

Where he slept that night, or whether he slept at all, he never knew.  But he had been back on the ground in the morning with the others who came to bury the naked bodies.  He had seen heaps of them piled in little depressions and the dirt thrown loosely over them, and he remembered that the wolves were at them all a day later.

Then Dame and Haight and others of high standing in the Church had come to look over the spot and there another oath of secrecy was taken.  Any informer was to be “sent over the rim of the basin”—­except that one of their number was to make a full report to the President at Salt Lake City.  Klingensmith was then chosen by vote to take charge of the goods for the benefit of the Church.  Klingensmith, Haight, and Higbee, he recalled, had later driven two hundred head of the cattle to Salt Lake City and sold them.  Klingensmith, too, had put the clothing taken from the bodies, blood-stained, shredded by bullets and knives, into the cellar of the tithing office at Cedar City.  Here there had been, a few weeks later, a public auction of the property taken, the Bishop, who presided as auctioneer, facetiously styling it “plunder taken at the siege of Sebastopol.”  The clothing, however, with the telltale marks upon it, was reserved from the auction and sold privately from the tithing office.  Many stout wagons and valuable pieces of equipment had thus been cheaply secured by the Saints round about Cedar City.

He knew that the surviving children, seventeen in number, had been “sold out” to Saints in and about Cedar City, Harmony, and Painter’s Creek, who would later present bills for their keep.