Joel Rae, "bred in the word and the truth" of Mormonism, if not born in it, returns to Nauvoo from a mission just upon the time that the last remnant of the Saints have departed from that ill-fated city. He finds that the home of his parents in the outskirts of Nauvoo has been destroyed by mobs; and that his aged father and mother were driven into Nauvoo, where they are for the time under the protection of an apostate family; that his fiancee, with her family, has turned from the faith, and she is only awaiting his arrival to ascertain if he will join her in her apostasy. This he refuses to do, and with his parents prepares to follow his expatriated people in their great westward movement. While being ferried over the Mississippi, the aged father of young Rae--the son not being present--is pitched into the river by ruffian hands and is drowned; his aged mother dies from the shock of the horrible murder; and young Rae, made desperate by those events, becomes a "Son of Dan," a supposed secret society of the blood and thunder order, oath-bound to "support the First Presidency of the Church of, Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, in all things, right or wrong!" He forms one of the band of pioneers which Brigham Young led to the Salt Lake valley in 1847, and gives numerous evidences of increasing fanaticism, much to the delight of the Mormon leaders, which delight is here and there expressed in silly, blasphemous sentences of which the following is a fair sample: "When that young man [Rae] gets all het up with the Holy Ghost, the Angel of the Lord just has to give down!" In the new home of the Saints young Rae does his full share of both manual and spiritual labor. In the latter he succeeded too well since he preached better, worked more seeming miracles, and prophesied more than the other "Lions of the Lord." Brigham declares him "soul proud," and sends him to the Missouri river in 1857 to bring in the handcart companies, in which expedition he witnesses enough distress and misery to humble the most "soul proud" man alive, since the sufferings of the handcart companies from cold, famine and over toil is the result of his own bad judgement in starting late in the season. Arriving in Salt Lake, however, his fanatical preaching starts a "reformation," i. e., an outburst of wild fanaticism attended upon by murders, and voluntary submissions to secret executions, to atone for the commission of the more heinous sins. Rae's fanaticism makes him a participant in the Mountain Meadows massacre in which it falls to his lot to kill the young militia captain--Grimway--who had assisted Rae to leave Nauvoo, and who subsequently married the woman to whom Rae was betrothed. She, too, was with the emigrants attacked at Mountain Meadows, and Rae, after killing her husband, saw her murdered and scalped by an Indian. From the number of emigrants doomed to death Rae rescued a white-haired boy and the little daughter of his one-time betrothed wife, Prudence Corson.