“You ought to thank me, Brother Rae, for not telling you on the other side, when you asked me. I knew better. Because, why? Because I knew you’d fly off the handle and get yourself killed, and then your ma’d be left all alone, that’s why, now—and prob’ly they’d ’a’ wound up by dumping the whole passle of us bag and baggage into the stream. And it wa’n’t any use, your father bein’ dead and gone.” The Bishop took up the burden, slapping him cordially on the back. “Come, come,—hearten up, now! Your pa’s been made a martyr—he’s beautified his inheritance in Zion—whinin’ won’t do no good.” He drew himself up with a shrug, as if to throw off an invisible burden, and answered, calmly: “I’m not whining, Bishop. Perhaps you were right not to tell me over there, Keaton. I’d have made trouble for you all.” He smiled painfully in his effort to control himself. “Were you there, Bishop?” “No, I’d already gone acrost. Keaton here saw it.” Keaton took up the tale. “I was there when the old gentleman drove down singing, ‘Lo, the Gentile chain is broken.’ He was awful chipper. Then one of ’em called him old Father Time, and he answered back. I disremember what, but, any way, one word fired another until they was cussin’ Giles Rae up hill and down dale, and instead of keepin’ his head shet like he had ought to have done, he was prophesyin’ curses, desolations, famines, and pestilences on ’em all, and callin’ ’em enemies of Christ. He was sassy—I can’t deny that—and that’s where he wa’n’t wise. Some of the mobocrats was drunk and some was mad; they was all in their high-heeled boots one way or another, and he enraged ’em more. So he says, finally, ‘The Jews fell,’ he says, ‘because they wouldn’t receive their Messiah, the Shiloh, the Saviour. They wet their hands,’ he says, ‘in the best blood that had flowed through the lineage of Judah, and they had to pay the cost. And so will you cowards of Illinois,’ he says, ‘have to pay the penalty for sheddin’ the blood of Joseph Smith, the best blood that has flowed since the Lord’s Christ,’ he says. ‘The wrath of God,’ he says, ‘will abide upon you.’ The old gentleman was a powerful denouncer when he was in the spirit of it—” “Come, come, Keaton, hurry, for God’s sake—get on!”