III
The Apostle
The followers of Joseph Smith, - who called himself the martyr of fanaticism, - after seeing the ruin of their settlement in Illinois, went, like the Israelite people of old, through the solitude, to Salt Lake.
On the night that our story began, they had set up their tents on the grassy banks of the Swec-Water River.
Before they reached Independence Rock, a mountain cut into the ground, square and crenellated like an old fortress, they had to pass through the "Devil's Gate," a singularly chosen name, as the pass it designated led to the Valley of the Saints. Had the person who had so named the place been animated by a prophetic instinct? Had he foreseen the arrival of the visionaries of whom we speak?
There was something attractive and patriarchal in the appearance of
