On either flank the march was timed and ordered with the precision of practice. This same manœuvre had been repeated every day of the long journey. Precisely as the foremost teams met at the upper end of the curve, the two hindmost were parting at the lower. The ellipse was complete. It locked itself top and bottom. The train came to a halt. Every wagon of the two hundred stopped close upon the heels of its file leader.
A tall man, half pioneer, half deacon, in dress and mien, galloped up and down the ring. This was Sizzum, so the by-standers informed us. At a signal from him, the oxen, two and three yoke to a wagon, were unyoked, herded, and driven off to wash the dust from their protestant nostrils, and graze over the russet prairie. They huddled along, a great army, a thousand strong. Their brown flanks grew ruddy with the low sunshine. A cloud of golden dust rose and hung over them. The air was loud with their lowing. Relieved from their drags, the herd frisked away with unwieldy gambolling. We turned to the camp, that improvised city in the wilderness.
Nothing could be more systematic than its arrangement. Order is welcome in the world. Order is only second to beauty. It is, indeed, the skeleton of beauty. Beauty seeks order, and becomes its raiment. Every great white-hooded, picturesque wagon of the Mormon caravan was in its place. The tongue of each rested on the axle of its forerunner, or was ranged upon the grass beneath. The ellipse became a fort and a corral. Within, the cattle could be safely herded. Marauding Redskins would gallop about in vain. Nothing stampedable there. Scalping Redskins, too, would be baffled. They could not make a dash through the camp, whisk off a scalp, and vanish untouched. March and encampment both had been marshalled with masterly skill.
“Sizzum,” Brent avowed to me, sotto voce, “may be a blind guide with ditchward tendencies in faith. He certainly knows how to handle his heretics in the field. I have seen old tacticians, Maréchales and Feldzeugmeisters, in Europe, with El Dorado on each shoulder, and Golconda on the left breast, who would have tied up that train into knots that none of them would be Alexander enough to cut.”
CHAPTER IX.
SIZZUM AND HIS HERETICS.
No sooner had this nomad town settled itself quietly for the night, than a town-meeting collected in the open of the amphitheatre.
“Now, brethren,” says Shamberlain to us, “ef you want to hear exhortin’ as runs without stoppin’, step up and listen to the Apossle of the Gentiles. Prehaps,” and here Jake winked perceptibly, “you’ll be teched, and want to jine, and prehaps you wont. Ef you’re docyle you’ll be teched, ef you’re bulls of Bashan you wont be teched.”
“How did you happen to be converted yourself, Jake?” Brent asked. “You’ve never told me.”
“Why, you see I was naturally of a religious nater, and I’ve tried ’em all, but I never fell foul of a religion that had real proved miracles, till I seed a man, born dumb, what was cured by the Prophet Joseph looking down his throat and tellin’ his palate to speak up,—and it did speak up, did that there palate, and went on talkin’ most oncommon. It’s onbeknown tongues it talks, suthin like gibberidge; but Joseph said that was how the tongues sounded in the Apossles’ time to them as hadn’t got the interruption of tongues. I struck my flag to that there miracle. I’d seen ’em gettin’ up the sham kind, when I was to the Italian convent, and I knowed the fourth-proof article. I may talk rough about this business, but Brother Brent knows I’m honest about it.”