In all my journeys through the dark into other lives that have been mine I have never been able to guide any journey to a particular destination.
Thus many new experiences of old lives were mine before ever I chanced to return to the boy Jesse at Nephi.
Possibly, all told, I have lived over Jesse’s experiences a score of times, sometimes taking up his career when he was quite small in the Arkansas settlements, and at least a dozen times carrying on past the point where I left him at Nephi.
It were a waste of time to detail the whole of it; and so, without prejudice to the verity of my account, I shall skip much that is vague and tortuous and repetitional, and give the facts as I have assembled them out of the various times, in whole and part, as I relived them.
CHAPTER XIII
Long before daylight the camp at Nephi was astir.
The cattle were driven out to water and pasture.
While the men unchained the wheels and drew the wagons apart and clear for yoking in, the women cooked forty breakfasts over forty fires.
The children, in the chill of dawn, clustered about the fires, sharing places, here and there, with the last relief of the night-watch waiting sleepily for coffee.
It requires time to get a large train such as ours under way, for its speed is the speed of the slowest.
So the sun was an hour high and the day was already uncomfortably hot when we rolled out of Nephi and on into the sandy barrens.
No inhabitant of the place saw us off.
All chose to remain indoors, thus making our departure as ominous as they had made our arrival the night before.
Again it was long hours of parching heat and biting dust, sage-brush and sand, and a land accursed.
No dwellings of men, neither cattle nor fences, nor any sign of human kind, did we encounter all that day; and at night we made our wagon-circle beside an empty stream, in the damp sand of which we dug many holes that filled slowly with water seepage.
Our subsequent journey is always a broken experience to me.
We made camp so many times, always with the wagons drawn in circle, that to my child mind a weary long time passed after Nephi.
But always, strong upon all of us, was that sense of drifting to an impending and certain doom.
We averaged about fifteen miles a day.
I know, for my father had said it was sixty miles to Fillmore, the next Mormon settlement, and we made three camps on the way.
This meant four days of travel.
From Nephi to the last camp of which I have any memory we must have taken two weeks or a little less.
At Fillmore the inhabitants were hostile, as all had been since Salt Lake.
They laughed at us when we tried to buy food, and were not above taunting us with being Missourians.
When we entered the place, hitched before the largest house of the dozen houses that composed the settlement were two saddle-horses, dusty, streaked with sweat, and drooping.
The old man I have mentioned, the one with long, sunburnt hair and buckskin shirt and who seemed a sort of aide or lieutenant to father, rode close to our wagon and indicated the jaded saddle-animals with a cock of his head.
“Not sparin’ horseflesh, Captain,” he muttered in a low voice. “An’ what in the name of Sam Hill are they hard-riding for if it ain’t for us?”
But my father had already noted the condition of the two animals, and my eager eyes had seen him.
And I had seen his eyes flash, his lips tighten, and haggard lines form for a moment on his dusty face.
That was all.
But I put two and two together, and knew that the two tired saddle-horses were just one more added touch of ominousness to the situation.
“I guess they’re keeping an eye on us, Laban,” was my father’s sole comment.
It was at Fillmore that I saw a man that I was to see again.
He was a tall, broad-shouldered man, well on in middle age, with all the evidence of good health and immense strength—strength not alone of body but of will.
Unlike most men I was accustomed to about me, he was smooth-shaven.
Several days’ growth of beard showed that he was already well-grayed.
His mouth was unusually wide, with thin lips tightly compressed as if he had lost many of his front teeth.
His nose was large, square, and thick.
So was his face square, wide between the cheekbones, underhung with massive jaws, and topped with a broad, intelligent forehead.
And the eyes, rather small, a little more than the width of an eye apart, were the bluest blue I had ever seen.
It was at the flour-mill at Fillmore that I first saw this man.
Father, with several of our company, had gone there to try to buy flour, and I, disobeying my mother in my curiosity to see more of our enemies, had tagged along unperceived.
This man was one of four or five who stood in a group with the miller during the interview.
“You seen that smooth-faced old cuss?” Laban said to father, after we had got outside and were returning to camp.
Father nodded.
“Well, that’s Lee,” Laban continued. “I seen’m in Salt Lake.
He’s a regular son-of-a-gun.
Got nineteen wives and fifty children, they all say.
An’ he’s rank crazy on religion.
Now, what’s he followin’ us up for through this God-forsaken country?”