"If you are going to shoot Strang go now and do it," said the indignant young wife, and Bedford went out into the darkness. It was long past the midnight hour of June 17th when the waiting wife heard a pounding at the barred door of their log cabin. "Who is there?" "Friends." She stood with an axe in her hands prepared to defend herself, her children, and her home. Stating what defence she would make, if necessary, she told her visitors that she must know their names, before they would be admitted. On becoming assured that they were marines from the government steamer, Michigan, that her husband was aboard their ship, and that they had come to rescue her, she unbarred the door. A supper had been laid upon the table awaiting her husband's return, from which the sailors were glad to take refreshment. Bundling her two little ones and a few light effects, they fled to the steamer before the King's officers reached the house. Strang had been duly shot. In a few days a passing steamer carried him to Racine, from which place he was conveyed to Voree, where on July 8th he died from the effects of his wound. Bedford was taken to Mackinac and placed in an unlocked jail with a friendly guard, but boldly returned with his wife to Beaver Island. There was no recognized leader. The spell was broken. The Saints scattered, some in one direction and some in another, as opportunity offered, by passing vessels. Women wept as each party embarked. It was well known that at whatever port they might be landed their peculiar dress, which marked them as disciples of the despised and now fallen prophet, would invite the searching gaze and contemptuous jeers of rude and unsympathetic onlookers. Such was in fact their fate. Thus was closed the chapter of the Strangite defection. An old pioneer has related to the writer the story of the gallows, which was erected on the Michigan beach by the Mormons and which he cut down. Upon it was suspended the effigy of an obnoxious Gentile, which is preserved by its prototype to this day. At the time of the dispersion of the Strangites Brigham Young had long since established himself as the hierarch of the Mormon Church, and to that master mind was delegated supreme authority in conducting a movement that has hardly a parallel in history. The occasion for prompt, energetic, and sagacious leadership arose when in the autumn of 1845 armed mobs of so-called Illinois citizens descended upon Mormon settlements in the vicinity of Nauvoo and burned stacks of grain, and other property, also a score of homes, driving men and helpless women and children of Mormon families from their own farms out into the darkness. These brutal demonstrations were repeated by the destruction of mills, factories, and business property in Nauvoo, accompanied by demands that the Mormons must leave the country within sixty days.