By and by I subsided into an indignant silence, and
so sat until the end, hot and flushed, and execrating
him in my heart for an ignorant savage. But he
was calm. His conversation with those gentlemen
flowed on as sweetly and peacefully and musically
as any summer brook. When the audience was ended
and we were retiring from the presence, he put his
hand on my head, beamed down on me in an admiring way
and said to my brother:
“Ah—your child, I presume?
Boy, or girl?”
Mr. Street was very busy with his telegraphic matters—and
considering that he had eight or nine hundred miles
of rugged, snowy, uninhabited mountains, and waterless,
treeless, melancholy deserts to traverse with his
wire, it was natural and needful that he should be
as busy as possible. He could not go comfortably
along and cut his poles by the road-side, either,
but they had to be hauled by ox teams across those
exhausting deserts—and it was two days’
journey from water to water, in one or two of them.
Mr. Street’s contract was a vast work, every
way one looked at it; and yet to comprehend what the
vague words “eight hundred miles of rugged mountains
and dismal deserts” mean, one must go over the
ground in person—pen and ink descriptions
cannot convey the dreary reality to the reader.
And after all, Mr. S.’s mightiest difficulty
turned out to be one which he had never taken into
the account at all. Unto Mormons he had sub-let
the hardest and heaviest half of his great undertaking,
and all of a sudden they concluded that they were going
to make little or nothing, and so they tranquilly
threw their poles overboard in mountain or desert,
just as it happened when they took the notion, and
drove home and went about their customary business!
They were under written contract to Mr. Street, but
they did not care anything for that. They said
they would “admire” to see a “Gentile”
force a Mormon to fulfil a losing contract in Utah!
And they made themselves very merry over the matter.
Street said—for it was he that told us
these things:
“I was in dismay. I was under heavy bonds
to complete my contract in a given time, and this
disaster looked very much like ruin. It was an
astounding thing; it was such a wholly unlooked-for
difficulty, that I was entirely nonplussed.
I am a business man—have always been a
business man—do not know anything but business—and
so you can imagine how like being struck by lightning
it was to find myself in a country where written contracts
were worthless!—that main security, that
sheet-anchor, that absolute necessity, of business.
My confidence left me. There was no use in making
new contracts—that was plain. I talked
with first one prominent citizen and then another.
They all sympathized with me, first rate, but they
did not know how to help me. But at last a Gentile
said, ’Go to Brigham Young!—these
small fry cannot do you any good.’ I did
