he was shut in his room; for if neither
of the women was by her when she prayed, it was her custom to raise her
voice as high as she could, in the belief that otherwise her prayer
would not be heard by the Power she addressed. In high, piping tones
this petition for himself would come through his door, following always
after the request that the Lord would bless Brigham Young in his basket
and in his store, multiplying and increasing him in wives, children,
flocks and herds, houses and lands.
CHAPTER XXV.
_The Entablature of Truth Makes a Discovery at Amalon_
The house of Rae became a house of importance in the little settlement
in the Pine Valley. It was not only the home of the highest Church
official in the community, but it was the largest and best-furnished
house, so that visiting dignitaries stayed there. It stood a little way
from the loose-edged group of cabins that formed the nucleus of the
settlement, on ground a little higher, and closer to the wooded canon
that gashed the hills on the east.
The style of house most common in the village was long, low-roofed, of
hewn logs, its front pierced by alternating doors and windows. From the
number of these might usually be inferred the owner's current prospects
for glory in the Kingdom; for behind each door would be a wife to exalt
him, and to be exalted herself thereby in the sole way open to her, to
thrones, dominion, and power in the celestial world. There were many of
these long, profusely doored houses; but many, too, of less external
promise; of two doors or even one. Yet in a hut of one door a
well-wived Saint might be building up the Kingdom temporarily, until he
could provide a more spacious setting for the several stars in his
crown.
Then there was the capable Bishop Wright, whose long domestic barracks
were the first toward the main road beyond Bishop Coltrin's modest
two-doored hut. The Wild Ram of the Mountains, having lately been sealed
to his twelfth wife, and having no suitable apartment for her, had
ingeniously contrived a sleeping-place in a covered wagon-box at the end
of the house,--an apartment which was now being occupied, not without
some ungraceful remonstrance, by his first wife, a lady somewhat far
down in the vale of years and long past the first glamour of her
enthusiasm for the Kingdom. It had been her mischance to occupy
previously in the community-house that apartment which the good man saw
to be most suitable for his
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