rds that would be more dignified had the
task been entrusted to him. He told Brigham his satisfaction with the
address when the excited congregation had dispersed, and the alarmed
Brocchus had gone.

"That is the course we must take, Brother Brigham--do more of it. Unless
we take our stand now against aggression, the Lord will surely smite us
again with famine and pestilence." And Brigham had answered, in the
tones of a man who knows, "Wait just a little!"

But there came famine upon them again; in punishment, declared Joel Rae,
for their ungodly temporising with the minions of the United States
government. In '54 the grasshoppers ate their growing crops. In '55 they
came again with insatiate maws--and on what they left the drought and
frost worked their malignant spells. The following winter great numbers
of their cattle and sheep perished on the range in the heavy snows.

The spring of '56 found them again digging roots and resorting to all
the old pitiful makeshifts of famine.

"This," declared Joel Rae, to the starving people, "is a judgment of
Heaven upon us for permitting Gentile aggression. It is meant to clench
into our minds the God's truth that we must stand by our faith with the
arms of war if need be."

"Brother Rae is just a little mite soul-proud," Brigham thereupon
confided to his counsellors, "and I wouldn't wonder if the Lord would be
glad to see some of it taken out of him. Anyway, I've got a job for him
that will just about do it."

CHAPTER XIII.

_Joel Rae Is Treated for Pride of Soul_

Brigham sent for him the next day and did him the honour to entrust to
him an important mission. He was to go back to the Missouri River and
bring on one of the hand-cart parties that were to leave there that
summer. The three years of famine had left the Saints in the valley
poor, so that the immigration fund was depleted. The oncoming Saints,
therefore, who were not able to pay their own way, were this summer,
instead of riding in ox-carts, to walk across the plains and mountains,
and push their belongings before them in hand-carts. It had become
Brigham's pet scheme, and the Lord had revealed to him that it would
work out auspiciously. Joel prepared to obey, though it was not without
aversion that he went again to the edge of the Gentile country.

He was full of bitterness while he was obliged to tarry on the banks of
the Missouri. The hatred of those who had persecuted him and his people,
bred i