k up a sign, "Thorney is the path and
stickery the way that leedith unto the kingdom of heaven. Amen!"

Then when mother had put a nice clean valance, freshly starched and
ruffled, around the big four-poster bed in the sitting-room, Will would
daub it up with smearcase, and just before the preachers arrived, sneak
in under it, and wait for prayers.

Mother always desired us to file in quietly, but we couldn't pass the
bed without our legs being pinched; so we "hollered," but were afraid to
tell mother the reason before the ministers. We had to bear it, but we
snickered ourselves when the man Will called "Elder Green Persimmon,"
because when he prayed his mouth went inside out, came mincing into
the room, and as he passed the valance and got a pinch, jerked out a
sour-grape sneeze:

"Mercy on us! I thought I was bitten by that fierce dog of yours, Mrs.
Cody; but it must have been a burr."

Then the "experiences" would begin. Will always listened quietly,
until the folks began telling how wicked they had been before they got
religion; then he would burst in with a vigorous "Amen!"

The elders did not know Will's voice; so they would get warmed up by
degree as the amens came thicker and faster. When he had worked them
all up to a red-hot pitch, Will would start that awful snort of his
that always made us double up with giggles, and with a loud
cockle-doodle-doo! would bolt from the bed like a lightning flash and
make for the window.

So "preacher day," as Will always called it, became the torment of our
lives.

To tell the truth, Will always was teasing us, but if he crooked his
finger at us we would bawl. We bawled and squalled from morning till
night. Yet we fairly worshiped him, and cried harder when he went away
than when he was home.

CHAPTER VII. -- INDIAN ENCOUNTER AND SCHOOL-DAY INCIDENTS.

WILL was not long at home. The Mormons, who were settled in Utah,
rebelled when the government, objecting to the quality of justice meted
out by Brigham Young, sent a federal judge to the territory. Troops,
under the command of General Albert Sidney Johnston, were dispatched
to quell the insurrection, and Russell, Majors & Waddell contracted to
transport stores and beef cattle to the army massing against the Mormons
in the fall of 1857. The train was a large one, better prepared against
such an attack as routed the McCarthy brothers earlier in the summer;
yet its fate was the same.

Will was assigned to duty as