d of her mother, with reminders
of her mother's ways as she stood before him, a waiting poise of the
head, a lift of the chin. They looked at each other in the candle-light,
the child standing by the woman who had brought her, looking up at him
curiously, and he not daring to touch her or go nearer. She became
uneasy and frightened at last, under his scrutiny, and when the woman
would have held her from running away, began to cry, so that he gave the
word to let her go. She ran quickly into the other room of the cabin,
from which she called back with tears of indignation in her voice,
"You're not my papa--not my _real_ papa!"

When the people were asleep, he sat before the blaze in the big
fireplace, on the hearth cleanly swept with its turkey-wing and
buffalo-tail. There was to be one more night of his reprieve from
solitude. The three women of the house and the man were sleeping around
the room in bunks. The child's bed had been placed near him on the floor
after she slept, as he had asked it to be. He had no thought of sleep
for himself. He was too intensely awake with apprehension. On the floor
beside his chair was a little bundle the woman had brought him,--the
bundle he had found loosened by her side, that day, with the trinkets
scattered about and the limp-backed little Bible lying open where it had
fallen.

He picked the bundle up and untied it, touching the contents timidly. He
took up the Bible last, and as he did so a memory flooded back upon him
that sickened him and left him trembling. It was the book he had given
her on her seventeenth birthday, the one she had told him she was
keeping when they parted that morning at Nauvoo. He knew the truth
before he opened it at the yellowed fly-leaf and read in faded ink,
"From Joel to Prudence on this day when she is seventeen years old--June
2d, 1843."

In a daze of feeling he turned the pages, trying to clear his mind,
glancing at the chapter headings as he turned,--"Abram is Justified by
Faith," "God Instructeth Isaac," "Pharaoh's Heart Is Hardened," "The
Laws of Murder," "The Curses for Disobedience." He turned rapidly and at
last began to run the leaves from between his thumb and finger, and
then, well over in the book something dark caught his eye. He turned the
leaves back again to see what it was; but not until the book was opened
flat before him and he held the page close to the light did he see what
it was his eye had caught. A wash of blood was across t