r needings, too, if you come back, remember that!
That's the last of you, and we'll have no more vermin like you. Now see
what old Joe Smith, the white-hat prophet, can do for you in the Indian
territory!"

He stood at the stern of the boat, shivering as he looked at the
current, swift, cold, and gray under the sunless sky. He feared some
indignity had been offered to his father. They had looked at one another
queerly when they answered his questions. He went forward to the wagon
again.

"Brother Keaton, you're sure my father is all right?"

"I am sure he's all right, Brother Rae."

Content with this, at last, he watched the farther flat shore of the
Mississippi, with its low fringe of green along the edge, where they
were to land and be at last out of the mob's reach. He repeated his
father's words: "Thank God, they're like all snakes; they can't jump
beyond their own length."

The confusion of landing and the preparations for an immediate start
drove for the time all other thoughts from his mind. It had been
determined to get the little band at once out of the marshy spot where
the camp had been made. The teams were soon hitched, the wagons loaded,
and the train ready to move. He surveyed it, a hundred poor wagons, many
of them without cover, loaded to the full with such nondescript
belongings as a house-dwelling people, suddenly put out on the open
road, would hurriedly snatch as they fled. And the people made his heart
ache, even to the deadening of his own sorrow, as he noted their
wobegoneness. For these were the sick, the infirm, the poor, the
inefficient, who had been unable for one reason or another to migrate
with the main body of the Saints earlier in the season. Many of them
were now racked by fever from sleeping on the damp ground. These bade
fair not to outlast some of the lumbering carts that threatened at every
rough spot to jolt apart.

Yet the line bravely formed to the order of Seth Wright as captain, and
the march began. Looking back, he saw peaceful Nauvoo, its houses and
gardens, softened by the cloudy sky and the autumn haze, clustering
under the shelter of their temple spire,--their temple and their houses,
of which they were now despoiled by a mob's fury. Ahead he saw the road
to the West, a hard road, as he knew,--one he could not hope they should
cross without leaving more graves by the way; but Zion was at the end.

The wagons and carts creaked and strained and rattled under their
sw