As he listened to Brigham’s words, picturing the blood of the sinner smoking on the ground, his thoughts fled back to that night, that night of wondrous light and warmth, the last he could remember before the great blank came.
Now the voice of Brigham came to him again: “And almost all things are by the law purged with blood; and without shedding of blood is no remission!”
Then the service ended, and he saw Bishop Wright pushing toward him through the crowd.
“Well, well, Brother Rae you do look peaked, for sure! But you’ll pick up fast enough, and just in time, too. Lord! what won’t Brother Brigham do when the Holy Ghost gets a strangle-holt on him? Now, then,” he added, in a lower tone, “if I ain’t mistaken, there’s going to be some work for the Sons of Dan!”
Chapter XV.
How the Souls of Apostates Were Saved
The Wild Ram of the Mountains had spoken truly; there was work at hand for the Sons of Dan. When his Witness at last came to Joel Rae, he tried vainly to recall the working of his mind at this time; to remember where he had made the great turn—where he had faced about. For, once, he knew, he had been headed the way he wished to go, a long, plain road, reaching straight toward the point whither all the aspirations of his soul urged him.
And then, all in a day or in a night, though he had seen never a turn in the road, though he had gone a true and straight course, suddenly he had looked up to find he was headed the opposite way. After facing his goal so long, he was now going from it—and never a turn! It was the wretched paradox of a dream.
The day after Brigham’s sermon on blood-atonement, there had been a meeting in the Historian’s office, presided over by Brigham. And here for the first time Joel Rae found he was no longer looked upon as one too radical. Somewhat dazedly, too, he realised at this close range the severely practical aspects of much that he had taught in theory. It was strange, almost unnerving, to behold his own teachings naked of their pulpit rhetoric; to find his long-cherished ideals materialised by literal-minded, practiced men.
He heard again the oath he had sworn, back on the river-flat: “I will assist in executing all the decrees of the First President, Patriarch, or President of the Twelve, and I will cause all who speak evil of the Presidency or Heads of the Church to die the death of dissenters or apostates—” And then he had heard the business of the meeting discussed. Decisions were reached swiftly, and orders given in words that were few and plain. Even had these orders been repugnant to him, they were not to be questioned; they came from an infallible priesthood, obedience to which was the first essential to his soul’s salvation; and they came again from the head of an organisation to which he was bound by every oath he had been taught to hold sacred. But, while they left him dazed, disconcerted, and puzzled, he was by no means certain that they were repugnant. They were but the legitimate extension of his teachings since childhood, and of his own preaching.
In custody at Kayesville, twenty-five miles north of Salt Lake City, were six men who had been arrested by church authority while on their way east from California. They were suspected of being federal spies. The night following the meeting which Joel Rae had attended, these prisoners were attacked while they slept. Two were killed at once; two more after a brief struggle; and the remaining two the following day, after they had been pursued through the night. The capable Bishop Wright declared in confidence to Joel Rae that it reminded him of old days at Nauvoo.