“And it isn’t as if I was regular out-and-out sinful. My adopted father, Ezra Calkins, he’s a good man. But, now I think of it, I don’t know what church he ever did belong to. He’ll go to any of ’em,—don’t make any difference which,—Baptist, Methodist, Lutheran, Catholic; he says he can get all he’s looking for out of any of ’em, and he kind of likes to change off now and then. But he’s a good man. He won’t hire any one that cusses too bad or is hard on animals, and he won’t even let the freighters work on Sunday. He brought me up not to drink or gamble, or go round with low folks and all like that, and not to swear except when you’re driving cattle and have to. ‘Keep clean inside and out,’ he says, ‘and then you’re safe,’ he says. ‘Then tie up to some good church for company, if you want to, not thinking bad of the others, just because you didn’t happen to join them. Or it don’t hurt any to graze a little on all the ranges,’ he says. And he sent me to public school and brought me up pretty well, so you can see I’m not plumb wicked. Now after you get me coming, I may be easier than you think.”
She resolved to pray for some special gift to meet his needs. If he were not really sinful, there was all the more reason why he should be saved into the Kingdom. The sun went below the western rim of the valley as they walked, and the cooling air was full of the fresh summer scents from field and garden and orchard.
Down the road behind them, a half-hour later, swung the tall, loose-jointed figure of Seth Wright, his homespun coat across his arm, his bearskin cap in his hand, his heated brow raised to the cooling breeze. His ruffle of neck whiskers, virtuously white, looked in the dying sunlight quite as if a halo he had worn was dropped under his chin. A little past the Rae place he met Joel returning from the village.
“Evening, Brother Rae! You ain’t looking right tol’lable.”
“It’s true, Brother Seth. I’ve thought lately that I’m standing in the end of my days.”
“Peart up, peart up, man! Look at me,—sixty-eight years come December, never an ache nor a pain, and got all my own teeth. Take another wife. That keeps a man young if he’s got jedgment.” He glanced back toward the Rae house.
“And I want to speak to you special about something—this young dandy Gentile you’re harbouring. Course it’s none of my business, but I wouldn’t want one of my girls companying with a Gentile—off up in that cañon with him, at that—fishing one day, reading a book the next, walking clost together,—and specially not when Brigham had spoke for her. Oh, I know what I’m talking about! I had my mallet and frow up there two days now, just beyond the lower dry-fork, splitting out shakes for my new addition, and I seen ’em with my own eyes. You know what young folks is, Elder. That reminds me—I’m going to seal up that sandy-haired daughter of Bishop Tanner’s next week some time; soon as we get the roof on the new part. But I thought I’d speak to you about this—a word to the wise!”
The Wild Ram of the Mountains passed on, whistling a lively air. The little bent man went with slow, troubled steps to his own home. He did know the way of young people, and he felt that he was beginning to know the way of God. Each day one wall or another of his prison house moved a little in upon him. In the end it would crush. He had given up everything but Prudence; and now, for his wicked clinging to her, she was to be taken from him; if not by Brigham, then by this Gentile, who would of course love her, and who, if he could not make her love him, would be tempted to alienate her by exposing the crime of the man she believed to be her father. The walls were closing about him. When he reached the house, they were sitting on the bench outside.
“Sometimes,” Follett was saying, “you can’t tell at first whether a thing is right or wrong. You have to take a long squint, like when you’re in the woods on a path that ain’t been used much lately and has got blind. Put your face right close down to it and you can’t see a sign of a trail; it’s the same as the ground both sides, covered with leaves the same way and not a footprint or anything. But you stand up and look along it for fifty feet, and there she is so plain you couldn’t miss it. Isn’t that so, Mr. Rae?”
Prudence went in, and her father beckoned him a little way from the door.