Darling grew testy.  “Waal, I dunno, but it seems to me that if she’d gone off by now to be Mrs. Ephraim Croom somewheres in the East there wouldn’t be much more elect sister about her.”

“The gentleman whose name you have just been mentioning, Mr. Darling, is the lady’s uncle.  I was reared alongside them, and I know.”  He knew that he fibbed between uncle and cousin, but the slip was so slight and the end so worthy—­to silence Darling.

“’Twas no uncle that she wrote that ’ere letter to,” said Darling hotly.  He stuck out his legs and leant back in his chair, the picture of offence.

“You are mistaken concerning the meaning of the letter, Brother Darling, and it appears to me that in casting your eyes upon it you have gone beyond what is written concerning the duty of an elder; but as to your duty in destroying it—­considering that our sister asked for money, which it is our duty and privilege to supply—­But I promised Emmar to be back soon.  I will consult the Lord, Brother Darling, and have a word with you in the morning.”

Smith tramped with dignity over the long wooden floor of the darkened shed and let himself out with decisive clatter of the latch.

To his right lay the wooden town with twinkling lights, to his left the black prairie, and above the crystal vast a moonless night, so clear that the upward glance almost saw the perspective between nearer and farther stars innumerable.

This man was at all times possessed with the sense of otherness, sense of a presence around and above.  He was no sooner beneath the stars than he hung his head as if some one saw him.  With shame and pain written in the attitude of his hulking figure, he skulked out into the black fields.

Later that night, a lad, not of the Mormon brotherhood, making his way home in the dark to the town of Quincy, a little afraid of the dark, as lads are apt to be, was terrified by hearing a voice in the darkness, by dimly descrying a man’s figure prostrate upon the ground.  The lad shrank back to a recess of the snake fence.  There, trembling, he listened.

The voice in the hoarse whisper of intensity repeated, “Give me—­this woman—­give—­give.”  The breathing, like command rather than prayer, set the words grating on the air again and again.  “This woman—­this woman—­give! give! give!”

The cause of the lad’s terror was a strange conviction that the writhing creature on the earth was certainly conversing with something not of earth, whether God, or angel, or devil he did not ask.  He was encompassed by the dreadful belief that the other saw and heard what he could not.

The prostrate man clenched his fists and struck the black ground on which he lay.  There was an intense silence, and then again the grating breath of a hoarse throat that lay among the grass blades babbled forth a multitude of confessions and fiercely-worded supplications which the little lad could neither understand nor remember.