The Lions of the Lord: A Tale of the Old WestWilson, Harry Leon
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The Lions of the Lord: A Tale of the Old West
Wilson, Harry Leon
Historical fiction; Latter Day Saint pioneers -- Fiction; Western stories
“You mean well, daughter, but don’t be discouraged if he is slow to
take our truth. Perhaps he has a kind of his own as good as ours. A
woman I knew once said to me,’ Going to heaven is like going to mill;
if your wheat is good the miller will never ask how you came.’”
“But, Father, suppose you get to mill and have only chaff?”
“That is the same answer I made, dear. I wish I hadn’t.”
Later, when Prudence had gone, the two men made their beds by the fire
in the big room. Follett was awakened twice by the other putting wood
on the fire; and twice more by his pitiful pleading with something at
his back not to come in front of him.
Chapter XXXVI.
The Mission to a Deserving Gentile
Not daunted by her father’s strange lack of enthusiasm, Prudence arose
with the thought of her self-imposed mission strong upon her. Nor was
she in any degree cooled from it by a sight of the lost sheep striding
up from the creek, the first level sunrays touching his tousled yellow
hair, his face glowing, breathing his full of the wine-like air, and
joyously showing in every move his faultless attunement with all
outside himself. The frank simplicity of his greeting, his careless
unenlightenment of his own wretched spiritual state, thrilled her like
an electric shock with a strange new pity for him. She prayed on the
spot for power to send him into the waters of baptism. When the day had
begun, she lost no time in opening up the truth to him.
If the young man was at all amazed by the utter wholeness of her
conviction that she was stooping from an immense height to pluck him
from the burning, he succeeded in hiding it. He assumed with her at
once that she was saved, that he was in the way of being lost, and that
his behooving was to listen to her meekly. Her very evident alarm for
his lost condition, her earnest desire to save him, were what he felt
moved to dwell upon, rather than a certain spiritual condescension
which he could not wholly ignore.
After some general counsel, in the morning, she took out her old,
dog-eared “Book of Mormon,” a first edition, printed at Palmyra, New
York, in 1830, “By Joseph Smith, Jr., Author and Proprietor,” and led
the not unworthy Gentile again to the cañon. There in her favourite
nook of pines beside the stream, she would share with him as much of
the Lord’s truth as his darkened mind could be made conscious of.
When at last she was seated on the brown carpet under the pines, her
back to a mighty boulder, the sacred record in her lap, and the Gentile
prone at her feet, she found it no easy task to begin. First he must be
brought to repent of his sins. She began to wonder what his sins could
be, and from that drifted into an idle survey of his profile, the line
of his throat as his head lay back on the ground, and the strong brown
hand, veined and corded, that curled in repose on his breast. She
checked herself in this; for it could be profitable neither to her soul
nor to his.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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