By and by I subsided into an indignant silence, and so sat until the end, hot and flushed, and execrating him in my heart for an ignorant savage.  But he was calm.  His conversation with those gentlemen flowed on as sweetly and peacefully and musically as any summer brook.  When the audience was ended and we were retiring from the presence, he put his hand on my head, beamed down on me in an admiring way and said to my brother: 

“Ah—­your child, I presume?  Boy, or girl?”

CHAPTER XIV.

Mr. Street was very busy with his telegraphic matters—­and considering that he had eight or nine hundred miles of rugged, snowy, uninhabited mountains, and waterless, treeless, melancholy deserts to traverse with his wire, it was natural and needful that he should be as busy as possible.  He could not go comfortably along and cut his poles by the road-side, either, but they had to be hauled by ox teams across those exhausting deserts—­and it was two days’ journey from water to water, in one or two of them.  Mr. Street’s contract was a vast work, every way one looked at it; and yet to comprehend what the vague words “eight hundred miles of rugged mountains and dismal deserts” mean, one must go over the ground in person—­pen and ink descriptions cannot convey the dreary reality to the reader.  And after all, Mr. S.’s mightiest difficulty turned out to be one which he had never taken into the account at all.  Unto Mormons he had sub-let the hardest and heaviest half of his great undertaking, and all of a sudden they concluded that they were going to make little or nothing, and so they tranquilly threw their poles overboard in mountain or desert, just as it happened when they took the notion, and drove home and went about their customary business!  They were under written contract to Mr. Street, but they did not care anything for that.  They said they would “admire” to see a “Gentile” force a Mormon to fulfil a losing contract in Utah!  And they made themselves very merry over the matter.  Street said—­for it was he that told us these things: 

“I was in dismay.  I was under heavy bonds to complete my contract in a given time, and this disaster looked very much like ruin.  It was an astounding thing; it was such a wholly unlooked-for difficulty, that I was entirely nonplussed.  I am a business man—­have always been a business man—­do not know anything but business—­and so you can imagine how like being struck by lightning it was to find myself in a country where written contracts were worthless!—­that main security, that sheet-anchor, that absolute necessity, of business.  My confidence left me.  There was no use in making new contracts—­that was plain.  I talked with first one prominent citizen and then another.  They all sympathized with me, first rate, but they did not know how to help me.  But at last a Gentile said, ’Go to Brigham Young!—­these small fry cannot do you any good.’  I did