“You want to know how the prophet’s death came about, and I can tell you; for when my disease came on, and the doctor told me ’twas fatal, I started to go up to Nauvoo to ask the prophet to lay his hands upon me and heal me.  But when I got there the city was all in a buzz, for the cause that some of the elders had got out a paper accusing the prophet of having a lot of ladies for wives.  Well now, I can tell you how that came about.  When our prophet first got the charter for the Nauvoo Legion there was a man called Bennet, who had been general in the American army, and who was steeped in unbelief and ambition, and who came and offered his services to the prophet, and was allowed to build up the Nauvoo Legion.  He was a most sinful man, and the prophet, he knew his sinfulness, but thought that he ought to take any help to build up an army to preserve his people from the fearful persecutions.  Bennet got hold of the worst side of the worst men we had in the Church, among which was the new usurper.”  He paused here with ire in his eye.  “I would be understood to mean Mr. Brigham Young, who has falsely usurped the prophet’s place; but there are many of us who will not follow him, no, not one step.  The Lord will requite him and his confederates, and will establish his true servants.”

“I fear, my good friend,” said Ephraim, “that although it is true that the Lord will establish his true servants, it is also true that their kingdom is not of this world.”

“Well, sir, tramping along as I’ve done many a day, with no companion but the disease that’s prevailing against me, I’ve thought that that may be true; but, whichever way it is, Bennet set himself to work iniquity, and they say that when the prophet could endure him no longer and gave him the sack, he had the vileness to dress himself up in the prophet’s clothes and go about in disguise, talking Sydney Rigdon’s rank spiritual-wife doctrine to the ladies and some of them were such fools that they thought it was the prophet, and that he disguised his voice and kept something over his face in order to work the iniquity in secret.  That’s what a gentleman who knew very well about it told me.  But anyway, when Bennet was gone out he wrote awful things to the Gentile newspapers concerning the domestic iniquities of Nauvoo; and he had his own party in the sacred city, and they up and put their scandals in the public print in the prophet’s own city.

“But the prophet he rose up and shook himself, like Samson when his arms were tied with the withes, and he denounced the wickedness, and went to the house where the paper was published, and kicked the printing press down himself, and burned the paper.  And that day he preached most powerful in the Nauvoo Temple.”

“We heard that it was on account of the illegality of his action in the printing office that the people of Illinois arrested him.”

The stranger did not answer directly.  His mind had passed on to scenes which had stirred him more personally.