His face was livid; in the effort to make his explanation, whether shaken by the recollections he described or by fear of her contempt, she saw that his limbs were actually trembling as if with cold.

“There ain’t many men, Mrs. Halsey, as would stay and face that sort of music when they could get away, but if it was to do good to mortal creature I’d think about staying, but it’s t’other way.  It’s me and Rigdon as has been advertised as working the bank; it’s my blood and his the Gentiles that have our notes are thirsting for.  Suppose we stayed and they took to mauling us again, wouldn’t the Saints here take to fighting to protect us?  I’ve taught them to fight in self-defence and they’d fight to defend me.  God knows there are better men than we are that would be killed right and left if we stayed, and ’twould be no use, for the Gentile numbers would overpower us.  ’Tain’t no use.  When I found to-day that there wasn’t a chance of staving off the bankruptcy I sent Emmar and the children and Rigdon’s folks off in a close waggon after sundown.  Rigdon’s rid off by another road, and I’ve got my horse ready and ought to be gone.  And there ain’t a man in Kirtland as will know which way we’ve gone by to-morrow, so that no Saint will need to do any lying on my account.”

“You are very sorry for the mistakes you have made about the bank,” she said pityingly.

He gave another short laugh that, like the first, was less like a laugh than a sob.

“I guess I’m sorry enough, but I don’t know whether it’s repentance, for I thought I’d done all just what the Lord told me to do, but at times like these I’m not so sure of the revelations I hear in my soul, but I know I thought I was right at the time; but as for being sorry, if ye had the burden of all these children of Israel in the desert on your heart, knowing that ye had brought them into the desert, and brought the hunger and the thirst and the pestilence and the enemy upon them, and weren’t quite sure at times whether the thing that ye saw leading was the Lord’s pillar of cloud or the devil’s, and if ye was now being cast out before the face of men and called a liar and a swindler, and without a dollar in the world, I guess ye’d know what it felt like to feel sorry.”

The room was a long one; in the fore part the glow from the hearth made clear the baby’s cradle, the table set for Halsey’s supper, the close shutters of the front windows, but the red flame rays were fainter as they came into this back portion where Susannah stood in dull distress a few paces from the stricken intruder.

This man had always the power at close quarters of producing strange disturbance in the emotions of his friends.  Susannah was trembling, her heart heaving, if not with pure compassion, at least with wild excitement on his account.