The Lions of the Lord: A Tale of the Old West

The city without life lay handsomely along a river in the early sunlight of a September morning. Death had seemingly not been long upon it, nor had it made any scar. No breach o...

Slight though his figure was, it was lithe and active and well-muscled, and he knew as they struggled that his assailant was possessed of no greater advantage than had lain in h...

In his cautious approach to the Daggin house, he came upon her unawares--a slight, slender, shapely thing of pink and golden flame, as she poised where the sun came full upon he...

She stood flushed and quick-breathing when the door had shut, he bending toward her with dark inquiry in his eyes. Before she spoke, he divined that under her nervousness some r...

By eight o'clock the next morning, out under a cloudy sky, the Raes were ready and eager for their start to the new Jerusalem. Even the sick woman's face wore a kind of soft and...

Listening to Keaton's tale, he had dimly seen the caravan of hunted creatures crawl past him over the fading green of the prairie; the wagons with their bowed white covers; a he...

The hosts of Israel had been forced to tarry for the winter on the banks of the Missouri. A few were on the east side at Council Bluffs on the land of the Pottawattamie Indians....

From his little one-roomed cabin, dark, smoky, littered with hay, old blankets, and skins, he heard excited voices outside, one early morning in January. He opened the door and...

Onto the West at last to build the house of God in the mountains. On to what Daniel Webster had lately styled "a region of savages and wild beasts, of deserts, of shifting sands...

So far on their march the Lord had protected them from all but ordinary hardships. True, some members of the company had suffered from a fever which they attributed to the cloud...

The floor of the valley was an arid waste, flat and treeless, a far sweep of gray and gold, of sage-brush spangled with sunflowers, patched here and there with glistening beds o...

The stream of Saints to the Great Basin had become well-nigh continuous--Saints of all degrees of prosperity, from Parley Pratt, the Archer of Paradise, with his wealth of wives...

Brigham sent for him the next day and did him the honour to entrust to him an important mission. He was to go back to the Missouri River and bring on one of the hand-cart partie...

A few of the Elders had preceded him to rejoice at the escape of the last hand-cart party from death in the mountains; and Brigham, after giving the newcomers some practical hin...

The Wild Ram of the Mountains had spoken truly; there was work at hand for the Sons of Dan. When his Witness at last came to Joel Rae, he tried vainly to recall the working of h...

He left Parowan the next morning to preach at one of the little settlements to the east. He was gone three days. When he came back they told him that the train of Missourians ha...

They chose William Bateman to go forward with a flag of truce. He was short and plump, with a full, round, ingenuous face. He was chosen, so said Klingensmith, for his plausible...

He was never able to recall the events of that day, or of the months following, in anything like their proper sequence. The effort to do so brought a pain shooting through his h...

A score of them left Cedar City with much warlike talk, with many ringing prophecies of confusion to the army now marching against them, and to the man who had sent it. They cit...

But with the coming of spring some fever that had burned in the blood of the Saints from high to low was felt to be losing its heat. They had held the Gentile army at bay during...

Along the level lane between the mountain ranges he went, a lane that runs almost from Bear Creek on the north to the Colorado on the south, with a width of twenty miles or so....

If something of the peace of the night-silence came to him as he rode, he counted it only the peace of surrender and despair. He knew now that he had been cheated of all his gre...

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 o...

The next day he sent across the settlement for the child, waiting for her with mixed emotions,--a trembling merge of love and fear, with something, indeed, of awe for this woman...

The house of Rae became a house of importance in the little settlement in the Pine Valley. It was not only the home of the highest Church official in the community, but it was t...

The watchful eyes of the Bishop had seen truly. Not only was the red coming back to the blood of Martha, but the fair flesh to her meagre frame, the spring of youth to her step...

Christina would now be left alone with the cares of the house, and he knew he ought to have some one to help her. The fever of sacrifice was also upon him. And so he found anoth...

The years of the Civil War passed by, and the prayer of Joel Rae was answered. But the time was now rapidly approaching when the Son of Man was to come in person to judge Israel...

In the valley of which Amalon was the centre, they made ready for the end of the world. It is true that in the north, as the appointed year drew nigh, an opinion had begun to pr...

In doubt and fear, the phantom of a dreadful certainty creeping always closer, the final years went by. When the world came to be in its very last days, when the little bent man...

They reached home in very different states of mind. The girl was eager for the solitude of her favourite nook in the cañon, where she could dream in peace of the wonderland she...

In a settled despair the little bent man waited for the end. Already he felt himself an outcast from Israel. In spirit he had disobeyed the voice of Brigham, which was the voice...

When she came across the fields late in the afternoon, the strange youth's horse was picketed where the bunch-grass grew high, and the young man himself talked with her father b...

"No fooling now,--feel the end of that gun in your back?" The other made no reply. Inside the door he took a candle from the box against the wall and lighted it.

By the time the women were stirring that morning, Follett galloped up on his horse. Prudence saw him from the doorway as he turned in from the main road, sitting his saddle with...

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...

June went; July came and went. It was a hot summer below, where the valley widens to let in Amalon; but up in the little-sunned aisle of Box Cañon it was always cool. There the...

Follett waited with a new eagerness next day for their walk to the cañon. But Prudence, looking at him with eyes that sorrow was clouding, said that she could not go. He felt a...

While matters of theology and consanguinity were being debated in Box Cañon, the little bent man down in the first house to the left, in his struggle to free himself, was tighte...

Follett awoke to find himself superfluous. The women were rushing excitedly through their housework in order to be at hand when the procession of Brigham and his suite should ma...

Down in the village the various dinners of ceremony to the visiting officials were over. An hour had followed of decent rest and informal chat between the visitors and their hos...

It was dusk when they rode down the hill together. They followed the cañon road to its meeting with the main highway at the northern edge of Amalon. Where the roads joined they...

Half an hour later they heard the sound of voices and wheels. Follett looked up and saw a light wagon with four men in it driving into the Meadows from the south. The driver was...