ons for departure in a sort of hopeless hope. As the
train drew out from Ogden, I looked back at the mountains from my car
window, and saw again, in the spectacle of their power, the pathos of
our people--as if it were the nation of my worship that bulked there
so huge above the people of my love--and I, puny in my little efforts,
going out to plot an intercession, to appeal for a truce! It was almost
as if I were the son of a Confederate leader journeying to Washington,
on the eve of the Civil War, to attempt to stand between North and South
and hold back their opposing armies, single-handed.

These are the things a man does when he is young.

Chapter II. On A Mission to Washington

I went discredited, as an envoy, by an incident of personal conflict
with the Federal authorities; and I wish to relate that incident before
I proceed any farther. I must relate it soon, because it came up for
explanation in one of my first interviews with President Cleveland; and
I wish to relate it now, because it was so typical of the day and the
condition from which we had to save ourselves.

In the winter of 1885-6, the United States Marshals had been pursuing my
father from place to place with such determined persistence that it was
evident his capture was only a matter of time. We believed that if
he were arrested and tried before Chief Justice Zane--with District
Attorney Dickson and Assistant District Attorney Varian prosecuting--he
would be convicted on so many counts that he would be held in prison
indefinitely--that he might, in fact, end his days there. There was
the rumor of a boast, to this effect, made by Federal officers; and we
misunderstood them and their motives, in those days, sufficiently to
accept the unjust report as well-founded.

My father, as First Councillor of the Church, had proposed to President
Taylor that every man who was living in plural marriage should surrender
himself voluntarily to the court and plead: "I entered into this
covenant of celestial marriage with a personal conviction that it was an
order revealed by our Father in Heaven for the salvation of mankind. I
have kept my covenant in purity. I believed that no constitutional law
of the country could forbid this practice of a religious faith. As the
laws of Congress conflict with my sense of submission to the will of the
Lord, I now offer myself, here, for whatever judgment the courts of my
country may impose." He believed that such a c