"It does seem hard to believe--all this about Jones," remarked
Judd, one of Emmett's men.

"How could a man have the strength and the nerve? And isn't it
cruel to keep wild animals in captivity? it against God's word?"

Quick as speech could flow, Jones quoted: "And God said, 'Let us
make man in our image, and give him dominion over the fish of the
sea, the fowls of the air, over all the cattle, and over every
creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth'!"

"Dominion--over all the beasts of the field!" repeated Jones, his
big voice rolling out. He clenched his huge fists, and spread
wide his long arms. "Dominion! That was God's word!" The power
and intensity of him could be felt. Then he relaxed, dropped his
arms, and once more grew calm. But he had shown a glimpse of the
great, strange and absorbing passion of his life. Once he had
told me how, when a mere child, he had hazarded limb and neck to
capture a fox squirrel, how he had held on to the vicious little
animal, though it bit his hand through; how he had never learned
to play the games of boyhood; that when the youths of the little
Illinois village were at play, he roamed the prairies, or the
rolling, wooded hills, or watched a gopher hole. That boy was
father of the man: for sixty years an enduring passion for
dominion over wild animals had possessed him, and made his life
an endless pursuit.

Our guests, the Navajos, departed early, and vanished silently in
the gloom of the desert. We settled down again into a quiet that
was broken only by the low chant-like song of a praying Mormon.