ney enough! He's down there,
taking things easy, while the rest of us are driven from pillar to
post." He attacked the Federal authorities, Governor West, the "whole
gang." He cried: "I love my wives and my children--whom the Lord
gave me. I love them more than my life--more than anything in the
world--except my religion! And here I am, fleeing from place to place,
from the wrath of the wicked--and they're left in sorrow and suffering."

His face was pallid with emotion, and his voice came now hard with
exasperation against his enemies and now husky with a passionate
affection for his family--a man of fifty, graybearded, quivering in a
nervous transport of excitement that jerked him up and down the room,
gesticulating.

When he had worn out his first anger of revolt, I brought the
conversation round to the question of polygamy, by asking him about a
provisional constitution for statehood which the non-polygamous
Mormons had recently adopted. It contained a clause making polygamy a
misdemeanor. "I would have seen them all damned," he said, "before I
would have yielded it, but I'm willing to try the experiment, if any
good can come."

He had, I gathered, no aversion to "deceiving the wicked," but he was
opposed to leading his people away from their loyalty to the doctrine of
plural marriage, by conceding anything that might weaken their faith in
it. And yet this impression may misrepresent him. He was too agitated,
too exasperated, for any serious reflection on the situation.

My brother had gone--to keep some other engagement--and I stayed late,
talking as long as Smith seemed to wish to talk. He rose at last and
"blessed" me, his hands on my head, in a return to some larger trust in
his religious authority; and I left him--with very doubtful and mixed
emotions. His natural violence and his lack of discipline had been
matters of common gossip among our people, and I had heard of them from
childhood; but I had supposed that tribulations would, by this time,
have matured him. There was something compelling in his unsoftened
turbulence, but nothing encouraging for me as a messenger of
conciliation. I felt that there would be no help come from him in my
task, and I dropped him from my reckoning.

I had made up my mind to a plan that was almost as desperate as the
conditions it sought to cure--a plan that was in some ways so absurd
that I felt like keeping it concealed for fear of ridicule--and I went
about my preparati