Some doubt had been expressed that the earth’s surface could contain the resurrected host, but Apostle Orson Pratt had removed this.  He cited the prophet who had foretold that the hills should be laid low, the valleys exalted, and the crooked places made straight.  With the earth thus free of mountains and waste places, he had demonstrated that there would be an acre and a quarter of ground for each Saint that had ever lived from the morning of creation to the day of doom.  And, lest some carping mathematician should dispute his figures, he had declared that if, by any miscalculation, the earth’s surface should not suffice for the Saints and their Gentile slaves, the Lord “would build a gallery around the earth.”  Thus had confusion been brought to the last quibbler in Zion.

It was this earlier teaching that the faithful of Amalon clung to, perhaps not a little by reason that immediately over them was a spiritual guide who had been trained from infancy to know that salvation lay in belief,—­never in doubt.  For a sign of the end they believed that on the night before the day of it there would be no darkness.  This would be as it had been before the birth of the Saviour, as told in the Book of Mormon:  “At the going down of the sun there was no darkness, and the people began to be astonished because there was no darkness when the night came; and there was no darkness in all that night, but it was as light as if it were midday.”

They talked of little but this matter in that small pocket of the intermountain commonwealth, in Sabbath meetings and around the hearths at night.  The Wild Ram of the Mountains thought all proselyting should cease in view of the approaching end; that the Elders on mission should withdraw from the vineyard, shake the dust from their feet, and seal up the rebellious Gentiles to damnation.  To this Elder Beil Wardle had replied, somewhat testily: 

“Well, now, since these valleys of Ephraim have got a little fattened a whole lot of us have got the sweeny, and our skins are growing too tight on our flesh.”  He had been unable to comprehend that the Gentiles were a rejected lot, the lost sheep of the house of Israel.  On this occasion it had required all the tact of Elder Rae to soothe the two good men into an amiable discussion of the time when Sidney Rigdon went to the third heaven and talked face to face with God.  They had agreed in the end, however, that they were both of the royal seed of Abraham, and were on the grand turnpike to exaltation.

To these discussions and sermons the child, Prudence, listened with intense interest, looking forward to the last day as an occasion productive of excitement even superior to that of her trips to Salt Lake City, where her father went to attend the October conference, and where she was taken to the theatre.