not to be
lightly undertaken. Small parties, frightened on the edge of the
enterprise, joined themselves to stronger ones. The mountain men and
trappers delighted to augment the tremors of the fearful, and round the
camp fires listening groups hung on the words of long-haired men clad
in dirty buckskins, whose moccasined feet had trod the trails of the
fur trader and his red brother.

This year was one of special peril for, to the accustomed dangers from
heat, hunger, and Indians, was added a new one--the Mormons. They were
still moving westward in their emigration from Nauvoo to the new Zion
beside the Great Salt Lake. It was a time and a place to hear the
black side of Mormonism. A Missourian hated a Latter Day Saint as a
Puritan hated a Papist. Hawn's mill was fresh in the minds of the
frontiersmen, and the murder of Joseph Smith was accounted a righteous
act. The emigrant had many warnings to lay to heart--against Indian
surprises in the mountains, against mosquitoes on the plains, against
quicksands in the Platte, against stampedes among the cattle, against
alkaline springs and the desert's parching heats. And quite as
important as any of these was that against the Latter Day Saint with
the Book of Mormon in his saddlebag and his long-barreled rifle across
the pommel.

So they waited, full of ill words and impatience, while the rain fell.
Independence, the focusing point of the frontier life, housing
unexpected hundreds, dripped from all its gables and swam in mud. And
in the camps that spread through the fresh, wet woods and the oozy
uplands, still other hundreds cowered under soaked tent walls and in
damp wagon boxes, listening to the rush of the continuous showers.

CHAPTER II

On the afternoon of the fourth day the clouds lifted. A band of yellow
light broke out along the horizon, and at the crossings of the town and
in the rutted country roads men and women stood staring at it with its
light and their own hope brightening their faces.

David Crystal, as he walked through the woods, saw it behind a veining
of black branches. Though a camper and impatient to be off like the
rest, he did not feel the elation that shone on their watching faces.
His was held in a somber abstraction. Just behind him, in an opening
under the straight, white blossoming of dogwood trees, was a new-made
grave. The raw earth about it showed the prints of his feet, for he
had been standing by it thinking of the ma