might even be so taken
up with one young lady that he'd say, 'I won't even marry a second
wife--not for some time yet, that is--not for two or three years, till
she begins to get kind of houseworn,' But then after he's taken his
second, the others would come easy. Say he marries, first time, a tall,
slim, dark girl,"--he looked at her musingly while she gazed intently
into the stream in front of them.

"--and then say he meets a little chit of a thing, kind of heavy-set
like, with this light yellow hair and pretty light blue eyes, that he
saw one Sunday at church--"

Her dark face was flushing now in pained wonder.

"--why then it's so easy to keep on and marry others, with the preachers
all preaching it from the pulpit."

"But you wouldn't have to."

"No, you wouldn't have to marry any one after the second--after this
little blonde--but you'd have to marry her because it says here that you
'shall abide the law or ye shall be damned, saith the Lord God.'"

He pulled himself along the ground closer to her, and went on again in
what seemed to be an extremity of doubt.

"Now I don't want to be lost, and yet I don't want to have a whole lot
of wives like Brigham or that old coot we see so often on the road. So
what am I going to do? I might think I'd get along with three or four,
but you never can tell what religion will do to a man when he really
gets it."

He reached for her small brown hand that still held the Book of Mormon
open on her lap, and took it in both his own. He went on, appealingly:

"Now you try to tell me right--like as if I was your own brother--tell
me as a sister. Try to put yourself in the place of the girl I'd marry
first--no, don't; it seems more like your sister if I hold it this
way--and try to think how she'd feel when I brought home my second.
Would that be doing square by her? Wouldn't it sort of get her on the
bark? But if I join your Church and don't do that, I might as well be
one of those low-down Freewill Baptists or Episcopals. Come now, tell me
true, letting on that you're my sister."

She had not looked at him since he began, nor did she now.

"Oh, I don't know--I don't _know_--it's all so mixed! I thought you
could be saved without that."

"There's the word of God against me."

"I wouldn't want you to marry that way,--if I were your sister."

"That's right now, try to feel like a sister. You wouldn't want me to
have as many wives as those old codgers down there below, w