The hall was large and had many windows.  Men were in consultation upon a platform.  Women to the number of twenty sat close together upon benches.  Back of them stood another crowd.  But the women on the benches held Shefford’s gaze.  They were the prisoners.  They made a somber group.  Some were hooded, some veiled, all clad in dark garments except one on the front bench, and she was dressed in white.  She wore a long hood that concealed her face.  Shefford recognized the hood and then the slender shape.  She was Mary—­she whom her jealous neighbors had named the Sago Lily.  At sight of her a sharp pain pierced Shefford’s breast.  His eyes were blurred when he forced them away from her, and it took a moment for him to see clearly.

Withers was whispering to him or to some one near at hand, but Shefford did not catch the meaning of what was said.  He paid more attention; however, Withers ceased speaking.  Shefford gazed upon the crowd back of him.  The women were hooded and it was not possible to see what they looked like.  There were many stalwart, clean-cut, young Mormons of Joe Lake’s type, and these men appeared troubled, even distressed and at a loss.  There was little about them resembling the stern, quiet, somber austerity of the more matured men, and nothing at all of the strange, aloof, serene impassiveness of the gray-bearded old patriarchs.  These venerable men were the Mormons of the old school, the sons of the pioneers, the ruthless fanatics.  Instinctively Shefford felt that it was in them that polygamy was embodied; they were the husbands of the sealed wives.  He conceived an absorbing curiosity to learn if his instinct was correct; and hard upon that followed a hot, hateful eagerness to see which one was the husband of Mary.

“There’s Bishop Kane,” whispered Withers, nudging Shefford.  “And there’s Waggoner with him.”

Shefford saw the bishop, and then beside him a man of striking presence.

“Who’s Waggoner?” asked Shefford, as he looked.

“He owns more than any Mormon in southern Utah,” replied the trader.  “He’s the biggest man in Stonebridge, that’s sure.  But I don’t know his relation to the Church.  They don’t call him elder or bishop.  But I’ll bet he’s some pumpkins.  He never had any use for me or any Gentile.  A close-fisted, tight-lipped Mormon—­a skinflint if I ever saw one!  Just look him over.”

Shefford had been looking, and considered it unlikely that he would ever forget this individual called Waggoner.  He seemed old, sixty at least, yet at that only in the prime of a wonderful physical life.  Unlike most of the others, he wore his grizzled beard close-cropped, so close that it showed the lean, wolfish line of his jaw.  All his features were of striking sharpness.  His eyes, of a singularly brilliant blue, were yet cold and pale.  The brow had a serious, thoughtful cast; long furrows sloped down the cheeks.  It was a strange, secretive face, full of a power that Shefford had not seen in another man’s, full of intelligence and thought that had not been used as Shefford had known them used among men.  The face mystified him.  It had so much more than the strange aloofness so characteristic of his fellows.