the baby's grave. Truly he was a weird figure, with his
long hair, his moccasins, and fringed leggings. So old and
weather-beaten was his buckskin shirt that ragged filaments, here and
there, showed where proud fringes once had been. He was a man of flying
tatters. I remember, at his waist, dangled dirty tufts of hair that, far
back in the journey, after a shower of rain, were wont to show glossy
black. These I knew were Indian scalps, and the sight of them always
thrilled me.

"It will do him good," father commended, more to himself than to me.
"I've been looking for days for him to blow up."

"I wish he'd go back and take a couple of scalps," I volunteered.

My father regarded me quizzically.

"Don't like the Mormons, eh, son?"

I shook my head and felt myself swelling with the inarticulate hate that
possessed me.

"When I grow up," I said, after a minute, "I'm goin' gunning for them."

"You, Jesse!" came my mother's voice from inside the wagon. "Shut your
mouth instanter." And to my father: "You ought to be ashamed letting the
boy talk on like that."

Two days' journey brought us to Mountain Meadows, and here, well beyond
the last settlement, for the first time we did not form the wagon-circle.
The wagons were roughly in a circle, but there were many gaps, and the
wheels were not chained. Preparations were made to stop a week. The
cattle must be rested for the real desert, though this was desert enough
in all seeming. The same low hills of sand were about us, but sparsely
covered with scrub brush. The flat was sandy, but there was some
grass--more than we had encountered in many days. Not more than a
hundred feet from camp was a weak spring that barely supplied human
needs. But farther along the bottom various other weak springs emerged
from the hillsides, and it was at these that the cattle watered.

We made camp early that day, and, because of the programme to stay a
week, there was a general overhauling of soiled clothes by the women, who
planned to start washing on the morrow. Everybody worked till nightfall.
While some of the men mended harness others repaired the frames and
ironwork of the wagons. Them was much heating and hammering of iron and
tightening of bolts and nuts. And I remember coming upon Laban, sitting
cross-legged in the shade of a wagon and sewing away till nightfall on a
new pair of moccasins. He was the only man in our train who wore
moccasins and buckskin, and I have