good can come."

He had, I gathered, no aversion to "deceiving the wicked," but he was
opposed to leading his people away from their loyalty to the doctrine of
plural marriage, by conceding anything that might weaken their faith in
it. And yet this impression may misrepresent him. He was too agitated,
too exasperated, for any serious reflection on the situation.

My brother had gone--to keep some other engagement--and I stayed late,
talking as long as Smith seemed to wish to talk. He rose at last and
"blessed" me, his hands on my head, in a return to some larger trust in
his religious authority; and I left him--with very doubtful and mixed
emotions. His natural violence and his lack of discipline had been
matters of common gossip among our people, and I had heard of them from
childhood; but I had supposed that tribulations would, by this time,
have matured him. There was something compelling in his unsoftened
turbulence, but nothing encouraging for me as a messenger of
conciliation. I felt that there would be no help come from him in my
task, and I dropped him from my reckoning.

I had made up my mind to a plan that was almost as desperate as the
conditions it sought to cure--a plan that was in some ways so absurd
that I felt like keeping it concealed for fear of ridicule--and I went
about my preparations for departure in a sort of hopeless hope. As the
train drew out from Ogden, I looked back at the mountains from my car
window, and saw again, in the spectacle of their power, the pathos of
our people--as if it were the nation of my worship that bulked there so
huge above the people of my love--and I, puny in my little efforts,
going out to plot an intercession, to appeal for a truce! It was almost
as if I were the son of a Confederate leader journeying to Washington,