e forty great wagons in the
circle at Nephi, and all the men and women and children and lean cattle
that sheltered inside that circle? All such things no longer are, for
they were forms, manifestations of fluxing matter ere they melted into
the flux again. They have passed and are not.

And now my argument becomes plain. The spirit is the reality that
endures. I am spirit, and I endure. I, Darrell Standing, the tenant of
many fleshly tenements, shall write a few more lines of these memoirs and
then pass on my way. The form of me that is my body will fall apart when
it has been sufficiently hanged by the neck, and of it naught will remain
in all the world of matter. In the world of spirit the memory of it will
remain. Matter has no memory, because its forms are evanescent, and what
is engraved on its forms perishes with the forms.

One word more ere I return to my narrative. In all my journeys through
the dark into other lives that have been mine I have never been able to
guide any journey to a particular destination. Thus many new experiences
of old lives were mine before ever I chanced to return to the boy Jesse
at Nephi. Possibly, all told, I have lived over Jesse's experiences a
score of times, sometimes taking up his career when he was quite small in
the Arkansas settlements, and at least a dozen times carrying on past the
point where I left him at Nephi. It were a waste of time to detail the
whole of it; and so, without prejudice to the verity of my account, I
shall skip much that is vague and tortuous and repetitional, and give the
facts as I have assembled them out of the various times, in whole and
part, as I relived them.

CHAPTER XIII

Long before daylight the camp at Nephi was astir. The cattle were driven
out to water and pasture. While the men unchained the wheels and drew
the wagons apart and clear for yoking in, the women cooked forty
breakfasts over forty fires. The children, in the chill of dawn,
clustered about the fires, sharing places, here and there, with the last
relief of the night-watch waiting sleepily for coffee.

It requires time to get a large train such as ours under way, for its
speed is the speed of the slowest. So the sun was an hour high and the
day was already uncomfortably hot when we rolled out of Nephi and on into
the sandy barrens. No inhabitant of the place saw us off. All chose to
remain indoors, thus making our departure as ominous as they had made o