“Did he cross with Brother Wright?”
“Yes—he—” The man hesitated. Then came an interruption from the shore.
“Come, clear the gangway there so we can load! Here are some more of the damned rats we’ve hunted out of their holes!”
The speaker made a half-playful lunge with his bayonet at a gaunt, yellow-faced spectre of a man who staggered on to the boat with a child in his arms wrapped in a tattered blue quilt. A gust of the chilly wind picked his shapeless, loose-fitting hat off as he leaped to avoid the bayonet-point, and his head was seen to be shaven. The crowd on the bank laughed loud at his clumsiness and at his grotesque head. Joel Rae ran to help him forward on the boat.
“Thank you, Brother—I’m just up from the fever-bed—they shaved my head for it—and so I lost my hat—thank you—here we shall be warm if only the sun comes out.”
Joel went back to help on others who came, a feeble, bedraggled dozen or so that had clung despairingly to their only shelter until they were driven out.
“You can stay here in safety, you know, if you renounce Joseph Smith and his works—they will give you food and shelter.” He repeated it to each little group of the dispirited wretches as they staggered past him, but they replied staunchly by word or look, and one man, in the throes of a chill, swung his cap and uttered a feeble “Hurrah for the new Zion!”
When they were all on with their meagre belongings, he called again to the man in the wagon.
“Brother Keaton, my father went across, did he?”
Several of the men on shore answered him.