He drove off, leaving the other staring at the letter now crumpled in his hand.  He also said, in his subsequent narrative to the Entablature of Truth:  “You know I’ve always took Brother Rae for jest a natural born not, a shy little cuss that could be whiffed around by anything and everything, but when I drove off he had a plumb ornery fighting look in them deep-set eyes of his, and blame me if I didn’t someway feel sorry for him,—­he’s that warped up, like an old water-soaked sycamore plank that gits laid out in the sun.”

But this look of belligerence had quickly passed from the face of Joel Rae when the first heat of his resentment had cooled.

After that he merely suffered, torn by his reverence for Brigham, who represented on earth no less a power than the first person of the Trinity, and by the love for this child who held him to a past made beautiful by his love for her mother,—­by a thousand youthful dreams and fancies and wayward hopes that he had kept fresh through all the years; torn between Brigham, whose word was as the word of God, and Prudence who was the living flower of her dead mother and all his dead hopes.

Could he persuade Brigham to leave her?  The idea of refusing him, if he should persist, was not seriously to be thought of.  For twenty-five years he, in common with the other Saints, had held Brigham’s lightest command to be above all earthly law; to be indeed the revealed will of God.  His kingship in things material no less than in things spiritual had been absolute, undisputed, undoubted—­indeed, gloried in by the people as much as Brigham himself gloried when he declared it in and out of the tabernacle.  Their blind obedience had been his by divine right, by virtue of his iron will, his matchless courage, his tireless spirit, and his understanding of their hearts and their needs, born of his common suffering with them.  Nothing could be done without his sanction.  No man could enter a business, or change his home from north to south, without first securing his approval; even the merchants who went east or west for goods must first report to him their wishes, to see if he had contrary orders for them!  From the invitation list of a ball to the financing of a corporation, his word was law; in matters of marriage as well—­no man daring even to seek a wife until the Prophet had approved his choice.  The whole valley for five hundred miles was filled with his power as with another air that the Saints must breathe.  In his oft-repeated own phrase, it was his God-given right to dictate all matters, “even to the ribbons a woman should wear, or the setting up of a stocking.”  And his people had not only submitted blindly to his rule, but had reverenced and even loved him for it.

Twenty-five years of such allegiance, preceded by a youth in which the same gospel of obedience was bred into his marrow—­this was not to be thrown off by a mere heartache; not to be more than striven against, half-heartedly, in the first moment of anguish.