“Do it?” she queried, with a flash of spirit. “Of course I'll do it.”
“Ruth, I can't thank you. I can't. I've only a faint idea what you're risking. That distresses me. I'm afraid of what may happen to you.”
She gave him another of the strange glances. “I don't risk so much as you think,” she said, significantly.
“Why?”
She came close to him, and her hands clasped his arms and she looked up at him, her eyes darkening and her face growing paler. “Will you swear to keep my secret?” she asked, very low.
“Yes, I swear.”
“I was one of Waggoner's sealed wives!”
“God Almighty!” broke out Shefford, utterly overwhelmed.
“Yes. That's why I say I don't risk so much. I will make up a story to tell the bishop and everybody. I'll tell that Waggoner was jealous, that he was brutal to Mary, that I believed she was goaded to her mad deed, that I thought she ought to be free. They'll be terrible. But what can they do to me? My husband is dead... and if I have to go to hell to keep from marrying another married Mormon, I'll go!”
In that low, passionate utterance Shefford read the death-blow to the old Mormon polygamous creed. In the uplift of his spirit, in the joy at this revelation, he almost forgot the stern matter at hand. Ruth and Joe Lake belonged to a younger generation of Mormons. Their nobility in this instance was in part a revolt at the conditions of their lives. Doubt was knocking at Joe Lake's heart, and conviction had come to this young sealed wife, bitter and hopeless while she had been fettered, strong and mounting now that she was free. In a flash of inspiration Shefford saw the old order changing. The Mormon creed might survive, but that part of it which was an affront to nature, a horrible yoke on women's necks, was doomed. It could not live. It could never have survived more than a generation or two of religious fanatics. Shefford had marked a different force and religious fervor in the younger Mormons, and now he understood them.