He was revived by the sharp chill of night, and sat up to find his mind clear, alert, and active with new purposes. He had suffered greatly from thirst, so that when he tried to say a prayer of thanksgiving he could not move his swollen tongue. He was weakened, too, but the freezing cold of the desert night aroused all his latent force. He struggled to his feet, and laid a course by the light of the moon back to the spring he had left in the morning. How he reached the hills again he never knew, nor how he made his way over them and back to the settlement. But there he lay sick for many days, his mind, when he felt it at all, tossing idly upon the great sustaining consciousness of that vision in the desert. The day which he next remembered clearly, and from which he dated his new life, was one when he was back in the Meadows. He had ridden there in the first vagueness and weakness of his recovery, without purpose, yet feeling that he must go. What he found there made him believe he had been led to the spot. Stark against the glow of the western sky as he rode up, was a huge cross. He stopped, staring in wonder, believing it to be another vision; but it stayed before him, rigid, bare, and uncompromising. He left his horse and climbed up to it. At its base was piled a cairn of stones, and against this was a slab with an inscription:— “Here 120 Men, Women, and Children Were Massacred in Cold Blood Early in September, 1857.” On the cross itself was carved in deep letters:— “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.” He fell on his knees at the foot and prayed, not weeping nor in any fever of fear, but as one knowing his sin and the sin of his Church. The burden of his prayer was, “O God, my own sin cannot be forgiven—I know it well—but let me atone for the sins of this people and let me guide them aright. Let me die on this cross a hundred deaths for each life they put out, or as many more as shall be needed to save them.” He was strong in his faith again, conscious that he himself was lost, but burning to save others, and hopeful, too, for he believed that a miracle had been vouchsafed to him in the desert. Nor would the good _padre_, at the head of his procession of penitents in his little mission out across the desert, have doubted less that it was a miracle than did this unhappy apostle of Joseph Smith, had he known the circumstance of its timeliness; albeit he had become familiar with such phenomena of light and air in the desert. Chapter XXIII. The Sinner Chastens himself How to offer the greatest sacrifice—how to do the greatest service—these had become his problems. He concerned himself no longer with his own exaltation either in this world or the world to come.