If the young man was at all amazed by the utter wholeness of her conviction that she was stooping from an immense height to pluck him from the burning, he succeeded in hiding it. He assumed with her at once that she was saved, that he was in the way of being lost, and that his behooving was to listen to her meekly. Her very evident alarm for his lost condition, her earnest desire to save him, were what he felt moved to dwell upon, rather than a certain spiritual condescension which he could not wholly ignore.
After some general counsel, in the morning, she took out her old, dog-eared “Book of Mormon,” a first edition, printed at Palmyra, New York, in 1830, “By Joseph Smith, Jr., Author and Proprietor,” and led the not unworthy Gentile again to the cañon. There in her favourite nook of pines beside the stream, she would share with him as much of the Lord’s truth as his darkened mind could be made conscious of.
When at last she was seated on the brown carpet under the pines, her back to a mighty boulder, the sacred record in her lap, and the Gentile prone at her feet, she found it no easy task to begin. First he must be brought to repent of his sins. She began to wonder what his sins could be, and from that drifted into an idle survey of his profile, the line of his throat as his head lay back on the ground, and the strong brown hand, veined and corded, that curled in repose on his breast. She checked herself in this; for it could be profitable neither to her soul nor to his.
“I’ll teach you about the Book of Mormon first,” she ventured.
“I’d like to hear it,” said Follett, cheerfully.
“Of course you don’t know anything about it.”
“It isn’t my fault, though. I’ve been unfortunate in my bringing up, that’s all.” He turned on his side and leaned upon his elbow so he could look at her.
“You see, I’ve been brought up to believe that Mormons were about as bad as Mexicans. And Mexicans are so mean that even coyotes won’t touch them. Down at the big bend on the Santa Fé Trail they shot a Mexican, old Jesus Bavispee, for running off cattle. He was pretty well dried out to begin with, but the coyotes wouldn’t have a thing to do with him, and so he just dried up into a mummy. They propped him up by the ford there, and when the cowboys went by they would roll a cigarette and light it and fix it in his mouth. Then they’d pat him on the head and tell him what a good old boy he was—star bueno—the only good Mexican above ground—and his face would be grinning all the time, as if it tickled him. When they find a Mexican rustling cattle they always leave him there, and they used to tell me that the Mormons were just as bad and ought to be fixed that way too.”
“I think that was horrible!”
“Of course it was. They were bigoted. But I’m not. I know right well there must be good Mexicans alive, though I never saw one, and I suppose of course there must be—”