"'Ah?' says Scraggs. 'What's happened to you?' He sounded as if
he didn't believe it amounted to much, and Smithy warmed up. He
ladled out his woes like a catalogue. How he'd been blew up in
mines; squizzled down a mountain on a snow-slide; chawed by a bear;
caught under a felled tree; sunk on a Missouri River steamboat, and
her afire, so you couldn't tell whether to holler for the
life-savers or the fire-engine; shot up by Injuns and personal
friends; mistook for a horse-thief by the committee, and much else,
closing the list with his right bower. 'And, Mr. Scraggs, I have
put my faith in woman, and she done me to the tune of all I had.'

"'_Have_ you?' says Scraggs, still perfectly polite and
uninterested. "'_Have_ you?' says he, removin' his pipe and
spitting carefully outdoors again. And then he slid the joker
a'top of Smithy's play. 'Well, _I_ have been a Mormon,' says he.

"'What?' says all of us.

"'Yessir!' says Mr. Scraggs, getting his feet under him, and with a
mournful pride I can't give you the least idea of. 'A Mormon; none
of your tinkerin' little Mormonettes. I was ambitious; hence E. G.
W. Scraggs as you now behold him. In most countries a man's
standin' is regulated by the number of wives he ain't got; in Utah
it's just the reverse--and a fair test, too, when you come to think
of it. I wanted to be the head of the hull Mormon kingdom, so I
married right and left. Every time I added to the available supply
of Mrs. Scraggs, I went up a step in the government. I ain't all
the persimmons for personal beauty, so I had to take what was
willin' to take me, and they turned out to be mostly black-eyed