Content with this, at last, he watched the farther flat shore of the Mississippi, with its low fringe of green along the edge, where they were to land and be at last out of the mob’s reach. He repeated his father’s words: “Thank God, they’re like all snakes; they can’t jump beyond their own length.”
The confusion of landing and the preparations for an immediate start drove for the time all other thoughts from his mind. It had been determined to get the little band at once out of the marshy spot where the camp had been made. The teams were soon hitched, the wagons loaded, and the train ready to move. He surveyed it, a hundred poor wagons, many of them without cover, loaded to the full with such nondescript belongings as a house-dwelling people, suddenly put out on the open road, would hurriedly snatch as they fled. And the people made his heart ache, even to the deadening of his own sorrow, as he noted their wobegoneness. For these were the sick, the infirm, the poor, the inefficient, who had been unable for one reason or another to migrate with the main body of the Saints earlier in the season. Many of them were now racked by fever from sleeping on the damp ground. These bade fair not to outlast some of the lumbering carts that threatened at every rough spot to jolt apart.
Yet the line bravely formed to the order of Seth Wright as captain, and the march began. Looking back, he saw peaceful Nauvoo, its houses and gardens, softened by the cloudy sky and the autumn haze, clustering under the shelter of their temple spire,—their temple and their houses, of which they were now despoiled by a mob’s fury. Ahead he saw the road to the West, a hard road, as he knew,—one he could not hope they should cross without leaving more graves by the way; but Zion was at the end.
The wagons and carts creaked and strained and rattled under their swaying loads, and the line gradually defined itself along the road from the confused jumble at the camp. He remembered his father again now, and hurried forward to assure himself that all was right. As he overtook along the way the stumbling ones obliged to walk, he tried to cheer them.
“Only a short march to-day, brothers. Our camp is at Sugar Creek, nine miles—so take your time this first day.”
Near the head of the train were his own two wagons, and beside the first walked Seth Wright and Keaton, in low, earnest converse. As he came up to them the Bishop spoke.
“I got Wes’ and Alec Gregg to drive awhile so we could stretch our legs.” But then came a quick change of tone, as they halted by the road.
“Joel, there’s no use beatin’ about the bush—them devils at the ferry jest now drowned your pa.”
He went cold all over. Keaton, looking sympathetic but frightened, spoke next.
“You ought to thank me, Brother Rae, for not telling you on the other side, when you asked me. I knew better. Because, why? Because I knew you’d fly off the handle and get yourself killed, and then your ma’d be left all alone, that’s why, now—and prob’ly they’d ’a’ wound up by dumping the whole passle of us bag and baggage into the stream. And it wa’n’t any use, your father bein’ dead and gone.”
The Bishop took up the burden, slapping him cordially on the back.
“Come, come,—hearten up, now! Your pa’s been made a martyr—he’s beautified his inheritance in Zion—whinin’ won’t do no good.”
He drew himself up with a shrug, as if to throw off an invisible burden, and answered, calmly:
“I’m not whining, Bishop. Perhaps you were right not to tell me over there, Keaton. I’d have made trouble for you all.” He smiled painfully in his effort to control himself. “Were you there, Bishop?”
“No, I’d already gone acrost. Keaton here saw it.”
Keaton took up the tale.
“I was there when the old gentleman drove down singing, ‘Lo, the Gentile chain is broken.’ He was awful chipper. Then one of ’em called him old Father Time, and he answered back. I disremember what, but, any way, one word fired another until they was cussin’ Giles Rae up hill and down dale, and instead of keepin’ his head shet like he had ought to have done, he was prophesyin’ curses, desolations, famines, and pestilences on ’em all, and callin’ ’em enemies of Christ. He was sassy—I can’t deny that—and that’s where he wa’n’t wise. Some of the mobocrats was drunk and some was mad; they was all in their high-heeled boots one way or another, and he enraged ’em more. So he says, finally, ‘The Jews fell,’ he says, ‘because they wouldn’t receive their Messiah, the Shiloh, the Saviour. They wet their hands,’ he says, ‘in the best blood that had flowed through the lineage of Judah, and they had to pay the cost. And so will you cowards of Illinois,’ he says, ‘have to pay the penalty for sheddin’ the blood of Joseph Smith, the best blood that has flowed since the Lord’s Christ,’ he says. ‘The wrath of God,’ he says, ‘will abide upon you.’ The old gentleman was a powerful denouncer when he was in the spirit of it—”
“Come, come, Keaton, hurry, for God’s sake—get on!”
“And he made ’em so mad, a-settin’ up there so peart and brave before ’em, givin’ ’em as good as they sent—givin’ ’em hell right to their faces, you might say, that at last they made for him, some of them that you could see had been puttin’ a new faucet into the cider barrel. I saw they meant to do him a mischief—but Lord! what could I do against fifty, being then in the midst of a chill? Well, they drug him off the seat, and said, ‘Now, you old rat, own up that Holy Joe was a danged fraud;’ or something like that. But he was that sanctified and stubborn—‘Better to suffer stripes for the testimony of Christ,’ he says, ‘than to fall by the sin of denial!’ Then they drug him to the bank, one on each side, and says, ‘We baptise you in the holy name of Brockman,’ and in they dumped him—backwards, mind you! I saw then they was in a slippery place where it was deep and the current awful strong. But they hauled him out, and says again, ‘Do you renounce Holy Joe Smith and all his works?’ The poor old fellow couldn’t talk a word for the chill, but he shook his head like sixty—as stubborn as you’d wish. So they said, ‘Damn you! here’s another, then. We baptise you in the name of James K. Polk, President of the United States!’ and in they threw him again. Whether they done it on purpose or not, I wouldn’t like to say, but that time his coat collar slipped out of their hands and down he went. He came up ten feet down-stream and quite a ways out, and they hooted at him. I seen him come up once after that, and then they see he couldn’t swim a stroke, but little they cared. And I never saw him again. I jest took hold of the team and drove it on the boat, scared to death for what you’d do when you come,—so I kept still and they kept still. But remember, it’s only another debt the blood of the Gentiles will have to pay—”
“Either here on earth or in hell,” said the Bishop.
“And the soul of your poor pa is now warm and dry and happy in the presence of his Lord God.”
Chapter VI.
The Lute of the Holy Ghost Is Further Chastened
Listening to Keaton’s tale, he had dimly seen the caravan of hunted creatures crawl past him over the fading green of the prairie; the wagons with their bowed white covers; a heavy cart, jolting, creaking, lumbering mysteriously along, a sick driver hidden somewhere back under its makeshift cover of torn counterpanes; a battered carriage, reminiscent of past luxury, drawn by oxen; more wagons, some without covers; a two-wheeled cart, designed in the ingenuity of desperation, laden with meal-sacks, a bundle of bedding, a sleeping child, and drawn by a little dry-dugged heifer; then more wagons with stooping figures trudging doggedly beside them, here a man, there a woman leading a child. He saw them as shapes floating by in a dream, blurred and inconsequent. But between himself and the train, more clearly outlined to his gaze, he saw the worn face of his father tossed on the cold, dark waters, being swept down by the stream, the weak old hands clutching for some support in the muddy