cloud over the State of Utah.

 

Its invisibility, and the mystery which was attached to it, made this

organization doubly terrible. It appeared to be omniscient and omnipotent, and

yet was neither seen nor heard. The man who held out against the Church vanished

away, and none knew whither he had gone or what had befallen him. His wife and

his children awaited him at home, but no father ever returned to tell them how

he had fared at the hands of his secret judges. A rash word or a hasty act was

followed by annihilation, and yet none knew what the nature might be of this

terrible power which was suspended over them. No wonder that men went about in

fear and trembling, and that even in the heart of the wilderness they dared not

whisper the doubts which oppressed them.

 

At first this vague and terrible power was exercised only upon the recalcitrants

who, having embraced the Mormon faith, wished afterwards to pervert or to

abandon it. Soon, however, it took a wider range. The supply of adult women was

running short, and polygamy without a female population on which to draw was a

barren doctrine indeed. Strange rumours began to be bandied about—rumours of

murdered immigrants and rifled camps in regions where Indians had never been

seen. Fresh women appeared in the harems of the Elders—women who pined and wept,

and bore upon their faces the traces of an unextinguishable horror. Belated

wanderers upon the mountains spoke of gangs of armed men, masked, stealthy, and

noiseless, who flitted by them in the darkness. These tales and rumours took

substance and shape, and were corroborated and re-corroborated, until they

resolved themselves into a definite name.