While they were away other men, strangers, inhabitants of desert Nephi, came into camp and stalked about.  They were white men, like us, but they were hard-faced, stern-faced, sombre, and they seemed angry with all our company.  Bad feeling was in the air, and they said things calculated to rouse the tempers of our men.  But the warning went out from the women, and was passed on everywhere to our men and youths, that there must be no words.

One of the strangers came to our fire, where my mother was alone, cooking.  I had just come up with an armful of sage-brush, and I stopped to listen and to stare at the intruder, whom I hated, because it was in the air to hate, because I knew that every last person in our company hated these strangers who were white-skinned like us and because of whom we had been compelled to make our camp in a circle.

This stranger at our fire had blue eyes, hard and cold and piercing.  His hair was sandy.  His face was shaven to the chin, and from under the chin, covering the neck and extending to the ears, sprouted a sandy fringe of whiskers well-streaked with gray.  Mother did not greet him, nor did he greet her.  He stood and glowered at her for some time, he cleared his throat and said with a sneer: 

“Wisht you was back in Missouri right now I bet.”

I saw mother tighten her lips in self-control ere she answered: 

“We are from Arkansas.”

“I guess you got good reasons to deny where you come from,” he next said, “you that drove the Lord’s people from Missouri.”

Mother made no reply.

“. . .  Seein’,” he went on, after the pause accorded her, “as you’re now comin’ a-whinin’ an’ a-beggin’ bread at our hands that you persecuted.”

Whereupon, and instantly, child that I was, I knew anger, the old, red, intolerant wrath, ever unrestrainable and unsubduable.

“You lie!” I piped up.  “We ain’t Missourians.  We ain’t whinin’.  An’ we ain’t beggars.  We got the money to buy.”

“Shut up, Jesse!” my mother cried, landing the back of her hand stingingly on my mouth.  And then, to the stranger, “Go away and let the boy alone.”

“I’ll shoot you full of lead, you damned Mormon!” I screamed and sobbed at him, too quick for my mother this time, and dancing away around the fire from the back-sweep of her hand.

As for the man himself, my conduct had not disturbed him in the slightest.  I was prepared for I knew not what violent visitation from this terrible stranger, and I watched him warily while he considered me with the utmost gravity.

At last he spoke, and he spoke solemnly, with solemn shaking of the head, as if delivering a judgment.

“Like fathers like sons,” he said.  “The young generation is as bad as the elder.  The whole breed is unregenerate and damned.  There is no saving it, the young or the old.  There is no atonement.  Not even the blood of Christ can wipe out its iniquities.”