. He knew the
cause,--the shedding of innocent blood. They might have made war;
indeed, many of the revelations to Joseph discriminated even between
murder and that murder in which innocent blood should be shed; but the
truth was plain. They had shed innocent blood that day in the Meadows.
Now the Lord's favour was withdrawn and His coming deferred, perhaps
another thousand years. The torture of the thing came back to him with
all its early colouring, so that his days and nights were full of
anguish. He no longer dared open the Bible to that reddened page. The
cries already rang in his ears, and he knew not what worse torture might
come if he looked again upon the stain; nor could he free himself from
these by the old expedient of prayer, for he could no longer pray with
an honest heart; he was no longer unselfish, could no longer kneel in
perfect submission; he was wholly bound to this child of her mother, and
the peace of absolute and utter sacrifice could not come back to him.
Full of unrest, feeling that somehow the end, at least for him, could
not be far off, he went north to the April Conference. He took Prudence
with him, not daring to leave her behind.

She went with high hopes, alive with new sensations. Another world lay
outside her valley of the mountains, and she was going to peep over the
edge at its manifold fascinations. She had been there before as a child;
now she was going as a woman. She remembered the city, bigger and
grander than fifty Amalons, with magnificent stores filled with exotic
novelties and fearsome luxuries from the land of the wicked Gentile. She
recalled even the strange advertisements and signs, from John and Enoch
Reese, with "All necessary articles of comfort for the wayfarer, such as
flour, hard bread, butter, eggs and vinegar, buckskin pants and
whip-lashes," to the "Surgeon Dentist from Berlin and Liverpool," who
would "Examine and Extract Teeth, besides keeping constantly on hand a
supply of the Best Matches, made by himself." From William Hennefer,
announcing that, "In Connection with my Barber Shop, I have just opened
an Eating House, where Patrons will be Accommodated with every Edible
Luxury the Valley Affords," to William Nixon, who sold goods for cash,
flour, or wheat "at Jacob Hautz's house on the southeast corner of
Council-House Street and Emigration Square, opposite to Mr. Orson
Spencer's."

She remembered the hunters and trappers in bedraggled buckskin, the
plainsmen