Hare found himself looking up to a great and
luminous figure, and he loved this man.

As the days passed Hare learned many other things. For a while illness
confined him to his bed on the porch. At night he lay listening to the
roar of the river, and watching the stars. Twice he heard a distant
crash and rumble, heavy as thunder, and he knew that somewhere along the
cliffs avalanches were slipping. By day he watched the cotton snow down
upon him, and listened to the many birds, and waited for the merry show
at recess-time. After a short time the children grew less shy and came
readily to him. They were the most wholesome children he had ever known.
Hare wondered about it, and decided it was not so much Mormon teaching
as isolation from the world. These children had never been out of their
cliff-walled home, and civilization was for them as if it were not. He
told them stories, and after school hours they would race to him and
climb on his bed, and beg for more.

He exhausted his supply of fairy-stories and animal stories; and had
begun to tell about the places and cities which he had visited when the
eager-eyed children were peremptorily called within by Mother Mary. This
pained him and he was at a loss to understand it. Enlightenment came,
however, in the way of an argument between Naab and Mother Mary which
he overheard. The elder wife said that the stranger was welcome to the
children, but she insisted that they hear nothing of the outside world,
and that they be kept to the teachings of the Mormon geography--which
made all the world outside Utah an untrodden wilderness. August Naab did
not hold to the letter of the Mormon law; he argued that if the children
could not be raised as Mormons with a full knowledge of the world, they
would only be lost in the end to the Church.

Other developments surprised Hare. The house of this good Mormon was
divided against itself. Precedence was given to the first and elder
wife--Mother Mary; Mother Ruth's life was not without pain. The men were
out on the ranges all day, usually two or more of them for several
days at a time, and this left the women alone. One daughter taught the
school, the other daughters did all the chores about the house, from
feeding the stock to chopping wood. The work was hard, and the girls
would rather have been in White Sage or Lund. They disliked Mescal, and
said things inspired by jealousy. Snap Naab's wife was vindictive, and
called Mescal "that Ind