The Lions of the Lord: A Tale of the Old West

by Harry Leon Wilson

“Not so awful as refusing to obey counsel.”

“What became of the girl?”

“Oh, she saw it wasn’t no use trying to go against the Lord, so she married the Bishop. He said at the time that he knew she’d bring him bad luck—she being his thirteenth—and she did, she was that hifalutin. He had to put her away about a year ago, and I hear she’s living in a dugout somewhere the other side of Cedar City, a-starving to death they tell me, but for what the neighbours bring her. I never did see why the Bishop was so took with her. You could see she’d never make a worker, and good looks go mighty fast.”

He dreamed that night that the foundations of the great temple they were building had crumbled. And when he brought new stones to replace the old, these too fell away to dust in his hands.

The next evening he reached Cedar City. Memories of this locality began to crowd back upon him with torturing clearness; especially of the morning he had left Hamblin’s ranch. As he mounted his horse two of the children saved from the wagon-train had stood near him,—a boy of seven and another a little older, the one who had fought so viciously with him when he was separated from the little girl. He remembered that the younger of the two boys had forgotten all but the first of his name. He had told them that it was John Calvin—something; he could not remember what, so great had been his fright; the people at the ranch, because of his forlorn appearance, had thereupon named him John Calvin Sorrow.

These two boys had watched him closely as he mounted his horse, and the older one had called to him, “When I get to be a man, I’m coming back with a gun and kill you till you are dead yourself,” and the other, little John Calvin Sorrow, had clenched his fists and echoed the threat, “We’ll come back here and kill you! Mormons is worse’n Indians!”

He had ridden quickly away, not noting that some of the men standing by had looked sharply at the boys and then significantly at one another. One of those who had been present, whom he now met, told him of these two boys.

“You see, Elder, the orders from headquarters was to save only them that was too young to give evidence in a court. But these two was very forward and knowing. They shouldn’t have been kept in the first place. So two men—no need of naming names—took both of them out one night. They got along all right with the little one, the one they called John Calvin Sorrow—only the little cuss kicked and scrambled so that we both had to see to him for a minute, and when we was ready for the other, there he was at least ten rods away, a-legging it into the scrub oak. Well, they looked and looked and hunted around till daybreak, but he’d got away all right, the moon going under a cloud. They tracked him quite a ways when it come light, till his tracks run into the trail of a big band of Navajos that had been up north trading ponies and was going back south. He was the one that talked so much about you, but you needn’t ever have any fear of his talking any more. He’d be done for one way or another.”

For the first time in his life that night, he was afraid to pray,—afraid even to give thanks that others were sleeping in the room with him so that he could hear their breathing and know that he was not alone.

He was up betimes to press on to the south, again afraid to pray, and dreading what was still in store for him. For sooner or later he would have to be alone in the night. Thus far since that day in the Meadows he had slept near others, whether in cabins or in camp, in some freighter’s wagon or bivouacking in the snows of Echo Cañon. Each night he had been conscious, at certain terrible moments of awakening, that others were near him. He heard their breathing, or in the silence a fire’s light had shown him a sleeping face, the lines of a form, or an arm tossed out. What would happen on the night he found himself alone, he knew not—death, or the loss of reason. He knew what the torture would be,—the shrieks of women in deadly terror, the shrill cries of children, the low, tense curses of men, the rattle of shots, the yells of Indians, the heavy, sickening smell of blood, the still forms fallen in strange positions of ease, the livid faces distorted to grins. He had not been able to keep the sounds from his ears, but thus far the things themselves had stayed behind him, moving always, crawling, writhing, even stepping furtively close at his back, so that he could feel their breath on his neck. When the time came that these should move around in front of him, he thought it would have to be the end. They would go before him, a wild, bleeding, raving procession, until they tore his heart from his breast. One sight he feared most of all,—a bronzed arm with a wide silver bracelet at the wrist, the hand clutching and waving before him heavy strands of long, yellow hair with a gory patch at the end,—living hair that writhed and undulated to catch the light, coiling about the arm like a golden serpent.