any use, Joel.”
“Couldn’t we find his body?”
“Not a chance in a thousand. It was carried down by the current. It would mean days and mebbe weeks. Besides, we need you here. Here’s your duty. Sakes alive! If we only had about twenty minutes with them cusses like it was in the old days! When you’re ready to be a Son of Dan you’ll know what I mean. But never mind, we’ll see the day yet when Israel will be the head and not the tail.”
“My mother? Has any one told her?”
“Wal, now, I’m right sorry about that, but it got out before you come over. Tarlton McKenny’s boy, Nephi, rowed over in a skiff and brought the news, and some of the women went and tattled it to your ma. I guess it upset her considerable. You go up and see her.”
He ran forward toward the head of the train, hearing as he went words of sympathy hurried to him by those he passed. Mounting the wagon, he climbed over the seat to where his mother lay. She seemed to sleep in spite of the jolting. The driver called back to him:
“She took on terrible for a spell, Brother Rae. She’s only jest now got herself pacified.”
He put his hand on her forehead and found it burning. She stirred and moaned and muttered disjointed sentences. He heard his father’s name, his sister’s, and his own, and he knew she was delirious. He eased her bed as well as he could, and made a place for himself beside her where he could sit and take one of the pale, thin hands between his own and try to endow her with some of his abundant life. He stayed by her until their camping-place was reached.
Once for a moment she opened her eyes with what seemed to him a more than normal clearness and understanding and memory in them. Though she looked at him long without speaking, she seemed to say all there was to say, so that the brief span was full of anguish for him. He sighed with relief when the consciousness faded again from her look, and she fell to babbling once more of some long gone day in her girlhood.
When the wagon halted he was called outside by the driver, who wished instructions regarding the camp to be made. A few moments later he was back, and raised the side of the wagon cover to let in the light. The look on her face alarmed him. It seemed to tell unmistakably that the great change was near. Already she looked moribund. An irregular gasping for breath, an occasional delirious mutter, were the only signs of life. She was too weak to show restlessness. Her pinched and faded face was covered with tiny cold beads. The pupils of her eyes were strangely dilated, and the eyes themselves were glazed. There was no pulse at her wrist, and from her heart only the faintest beating could be heard. In quick terror he called to a boy working at a wagon near by.
“Go for Bishop Wright and tell him to bring that apothecary with him.”
The two came up briskly a few moments later, and he stood aside for them in an agony of suspense. The Bishop turned toward him after a long look into the wagon.
“She’s gone to be with your pa, Joel. You can’t do anything—only remember they’re both happy now for bein’ together.”
It made little stir in the busy encampment. There had been other deaths while they lay out on the marshy river flats. Others of the sorry band were now sick unto death, and many more would die on the long march across the Iowa prairie, dropping out one by one of fever, starvation, exposure. He stood helpless in this chaos of woe, shut up within himself, knowing not where to turn.
Some women came presently from the other wagons to prepare the body for burial. He watched them dumbly, from a maze of incredulity, feeling that some wretched pretense was being acted before him.
The Bishop and Keaton came up. They brought with them the makeshift coffin. They had cut a log, split it, and stripped off its bark in two half-cylinders. They led him to the other side of the wagon, out of sight. Then they placed the strips of bark around the body, bound them with hickory withes, and over the rough surface the women made a little show of black cloth.
For the burial they could do no more than consign the body to one of the waves in the great billowy land sea about them. They had no tombstone, nor were there even rocks to make a simple cairn. He saw them bury her, and thought there was little to choose between hers and the grave of his father, whose body was being now carried noiselessly down in the bed of the river. The general locality would be kept by landmarks, by the bearing of valley bends, headlands, or the fork and angles of constant streams. But the spot itself would in a few weeks be lost.
When the last office had been performed, the prayer said, a psalm sung, and the black dirt thrown in, they waited by him in sympathy. His feeling was that they had done a monstrous thing; that the mother he had known was somewhere alive and well. He stood a moment so, watching the sun sink below the far rim of the prairie while the white moon swung into sight in the east. Then the Bishop led him gently by the arm to his own camp.
There cheer abounded. They had a huge camp-fire tended by the Bishop’s numerous children. Near by was a smaller fire over which the good man’s four wives, able-bodied, glowing, and cordial, cooked the supper. In little ways they sought to lighten his sorrow or to put his mind away from it. To this end the Bishop contributed by pouring him drink from a large brown jug.
“Not that I approve of it, boy, but it’ll hearten you,—some of the best peach brandy I ever sniffed. I got it at the still-house last week for use in time of trouble,—and this here time is it.”
He drank the fiery stuff from the gourd in which it was given him, and choked until they brought him water. But presently the warmth stole along his cold, dead nerves so that he became intensely alive from head to foot, and strangely exalted. And when they offered him food he ate eagerly and talked. It seemed to him there had been a thousand matters that he had long wished to speak of; matters of moment in which he felt deeply; yet on which he had strangely neglected to touch till now.
He talked long with the Bishop when the women had climbed into their wagon for the night. He amazed that good man by asking him if the Lord would not be pleased to have them, now, as they were, go back to Nauvoo and descend upon the Gentiles to smite them. The Bishop counselled him to have patience.
“What could we do how with these few old fusees and cheap arms that we managed to smuggle across—to say nothing of half of us being down sick?”
“But we are Israel, and surely Israel’s God—”
“The Lord had His chance the other day if He’d wanted it, when they took the town. No, Joel, He means us to gether out and become strong enough to beat ’em in our own might. But you wait; our day will come, and all the more credit to us then for doin’ it ourselves. Then we’ll consecrate the herds and flocks of the Gentile and his store and basket, his gold and silver, and his myrrh and frankincense. But for the present—well, we got to be politic and kind of modest about such doin’s. The big Fan, the Sons of Dan, done good work in Missouri and better in Nauvoo, and it’ll do still better where we’re goin’. But we must be patient. Only next time we’ll get to work quicker. If the Gentiles had been seen to quicker in Nauvoo, Joseph would be with us now. We learned our lesson there. Now the Lord has unfurled a Standard of Zion for the gathering of Israel, and this time we’ll fix the Gentiles early.”
“Amen! Brother Seth.”
A look of deep hatred had clouded the older man’s face as he spoke. He continued.
“Let the wrath of God abide upon ’em, and remember that we’re bein’ tried and proved for a purpose. And we got to be more practical. You been too theoretical yourself and too high-flyin’ in your notions. The Kingdom ain’t to
