Some years later, in the '50's, Emeline, sitting opposite her husband at the breakfast-table, heard him announce from the morning paper:
“Murder of King Strang, the Mormon Prophet of Beaver Island.” All the details of the affair, even the track of the bullets which crashed into that golden head, were mercilessly printed. The reader, surprised by a sob, dropped his paper.
“What! Are you crying, Mrs. Arnold?”
“It was so cruel!” sobbed Emeline. “And Billy Wentworth, like a savage, helped to do it!”
“He had provocation, no doubt, though it is a horrid deed. Perhaps I owe the King of Beaver the tribute of a tear. He befogged me considerably the only time I ever met him.”
“You see only his evil. But I see what he was to Mary French and the others.”
“His bereaved widows?”
“The ones who believed in his best.”