y dinner.
The message read: "It is the will of the Lord that your father shall be
elected Senator from Utah."

I do not need to explain all the treacherous implications of that
announcement. As soon as I had recovered my breath, I wired back, for
such interpretation as they should choose to give: "God bless Utah. I am
coming home,"--and packed my trunk, for trouble.

Chapter VII. The First Betrayals

Before I reached Utah, my friends, Ben Rich and James Devine, met me, on
the train. The news of President Woodruff's "revelation" had percolated
through the whole community. The Gentiles were alarmed for themselves.
My friends were anxious for me. All the old enmities that had so long
divided Utah were arranging themselves for a new conflict. And Rich and
Devine had come to urge me to remember my promise that I would hold to
my candidacy no matter who should appear in the field against me.

Of my father's stand in the crisis Rich could give me only one
indication: after a conference in the offices of the Presidency, Rich
had said to President Woodruff: "Then I suppose I may as well close
up Frank's rooms at the Templeton"--the hotel in which my friends had
opened political headquarters for me--and my father, accompanying him
to an anteroom, had hinted significantly: "I think you should not close
Frank's rooms just yet. He may need them."

Rich brought me word, too, that the Church authorities were expecting
to see me; and soon as I arrived in Salt Lake City, I hastened to the
little plastered house in which the Presidency had its offices.

President Woodruff, my father, and Joseph F. Smith were there, in
the large room of their official apartments. We withdrew, for private
conference, into the small retiring room in which I had consulted with
"Brother Joseph Mack" when he was on the underground--in 1888--and had
consulted with President Woodruff about his "manifesto," in 1890. The
change in their circumstances, since those unhappy days, was in my mind
as I sat down.

President Woodruff sat at the head of a bare walnut table in a chair so
large that it rather dwarfed him; and he sank down in it, to an attitude
of nervous reluctance to speak, occupied with his hands. Smith took his
place at the opposite end of the board, with dropped eyes, his chair
tilted back, silent, but (as I soon saw) unusually alert and attentive.
My father assumed his inevitable composure--firmly and almost unmovingly
seated--and