There were soft grunts of assent.
“And no one lights their torch until you see mine. I’ll be at the freight office. Everything gets started at once before someone can sound the alarm. Once the fires are going good, there’s gonna be plenty of light, so keep your faces covered. We’ll meet back at the horses.”
“What about the animals inside the buildings?” someone asked.
After a moment of silence, there was a gruff, “What about them?”
There was a low whistle in the darkness. “We’re just going to let them burn?”
“What are you so squeamish about all of a sudden?” another voiced hissed softly. “You weren’t above shooting down those Mormon cows in Yelrome.”
There was no reply to that. Then a third voice spoke up. “What about the horses here? There must be eight or ten head in the corral.”
“Good thinking,” grunted the leader. “Abner. Go open the corral gate. But don’t shoo them out. They’ll scatter wide enough once things get a little hotter around here.” As the man beside him started to move, he reached and grabbed him, holding him still for a moment. He looked around. “I’ll give you all five minutes to get into place and get your kerosene spread real good. Remember, no one lights until you see my torch.”
He grinned wolfishly at them in the darkness. “This one’s for Frank Worrell, boys, so let’s do it right.”
John Kay and Howard Egan walked slowly back and forth along the walk in front of Brigham Young’s house. Each wore a heavy coat, gloves, a scarf wrapped around his face and ears, and two pairs of heavy woolen socks. But they still hugged themselves against the cold or beat at their bodies with flailing arms. It was an hour before dawn, and the coldest part of the night.
“Feel like singing?” Kay asked.
Howard watched his breath float slowly upward on the crisp air. “Anything to pass the time,” he agreed. “What shall we sing?”
Kay chuckled softly. “How about, ‘Awake, my soul, and with the sun, thy daily course of duty run’?”
Egan hooted softly. “Assuming we ever see the sun again.” Then he quoted the next two lines. “‘Shake off dull sloth, and early rise to pay thy morning sacrifice.’” He shook his head ruefully. “We’ve got the ‘early rise’ part down now, I think. Does being out here in the cold qualify as a morning sacrifice?”
John Kay, whose nature was naturally playful, was warming to his idea now. “Or how about we do, ‘From Greenland’s Icy Mountains,’ only we’ll change the words to ‘On Nauvoo’s Icy Plains’?” The man who loved to sing clapped his hands. “Or we could sing more loudly and start out with, ‘Mortals, awake!’”
“Yes!” Egan exulted. “At the top of our lungs. Why should everyone else be—” He stopped, suddenly gaping.
“What?” said Kay, seeing his partner stiffen.
Egan lifted his arm, pointing to the northeast. “Look!”
Kay turned, and with a sudden chill that had nothing to do with the temperature, he stared at the orange glow lighting the underside of the low clouds, throwing the temple into sharp relief. “Oh, no!” Kay exclaimed. “Fire! It’s the temple!”
Egan shook his head. “No, not the temple. Look! It’s beyond that. Farther out.”
From down the block they heard someone yelling. Then from the opposite direction another cry. The guards at other corners had seen it too. Even as they watched, the glow seemed to brighten.
Kay sprang into action. “Wake the President. I’ll start hammering on doors. This is not some little bonfire, Howard. This is major.”
Joshua came awake with a jerk and cried out as the pain jabbed into his side. Caroline was already up on one elbow. It was her shaking his shoulder that had brought him out of sleep. “Joshua, listen!”
He moaned as he rolled over slightly and sat up. “What?” But then he heard it too. Outside, men were shouting and calling to one another. He heard pounding. Someone was battering at a door across the street, probably his father’s. He went rigid as he realized what the voices were crying. “Fire! Fire! We’ve got a fire!”
Carefully now, he threw back the covers and swung out of bed. Grunting with the pain, he hobbled over to the window. Their bedroom was on the back of the house and the window looked to the east. Joshua pulled back the curtain as Caroline moved up beside him. There was a sharp intake of breath. It was as if some hellish dawn had preempted nature. The eastern sky was brightly lit, the underside of the clouds pulsing with oranges and yellows which threw everything into sharp relief.
“Oh, Joshua,” Caroline whispered. “What could it be?”
He shook his head slowly, not daring to speak what had jumped into his mind. “I don’t know, Caroline.” He turned, reaching for his trousers that hung over the back of a chair. “Go get Pa and Nathan. And Carl. Wake them all. Whatever it is, they’re going to need every man we can find to fight it.”
By sunrise, all efforts to fight the blaze were abandoned. The horrible shrieking cries of horses and mules and the frantic bellowing of oxen were silenced now. Hundreds of people stood on the far side of the street that fronted the freight yard, watching the roaring inferno—or rather six roaring infernos—with upraised hands to shield their eyes from the blistering heat. Joshua stood at the front of the crowd, staring vacantly at the sight before him, one arm holding Caroline tightly against him. The rest of the family were arrayed behind them in a half circle. No one spoke now. The enormity of what they saw before them shocked them all into silence.
Then all heads came up. There was a terrible screeching sound as the rafters of the largest warehouse began to twist and buckle. It was like watching a living thing gripped in its final death throes. The main beam that ran the length of the roof was tilting precariously now. The rafters clung to it, valiantly trying to hold it up against the dreaded flames. But then in one tremendous crash it gave way and collapsed inward. A huge tower of smoke, peppered with a million brilliant sparks of fire, surged upward, like some volcano blowing away its top to open up a crater to the sky.
Caroline’s shoulders slumped. She sagged against Joshua and, for the first time, started to cry.
Nathan, standing off to the side just behind them, felt a tap on the shoulder. It was Carl. He held a gallon can, square and with a handle on the top. The cap was gone. Without a word, he handed it to Nathan. Nathan knew instantly what it was. It reeked of kerosene.
Joshua saw the movement out of the corner of his eye and turned. Carl, seeing that Joshua was watching them, spoke softly, but in a voice tight with shock and outrage. “This wasn’t an accident, Joshua.”
“I never thought it was,” came the wooden reply.
There were just the three of them now. Joshua and his father stood back as Nathan took the grubbing hoe he carried and moved carefully into the smouldering pile of ashes that had once been the tack shed attached to the main stable.
“It was a good, strong steel box,” Benjamin murmured. “I think you should be all right.”
Joshua said nothing.
“Where was it?”
“Buried in a hole beneath the floorboards.”
“Then hopefully . . .” But Benjamin stopped. In what had been the wagon shed they had already seen brass fittings melted into twisted puddles, so intense had been the heat.
Nathan moved gingerly, avoiding hot spots, one arm up across his face to block out the acrid smoke and the terrible smell of burnt hair and flesh. He stopped, looking around, trying to orient himself, then began to pull at the ruins with the hoe.
It took him only five minutes. There was a dull metallic clank, and then he started pulling back the charred timbers. Joshua and Benjamin moved forward swiftly. Then they stopped, staring in shock. Whether the lid had buckled with the heat and twisted open, or whether the bills inside had gotten so hot they burst into flames spontaneously, they didn’t know and it didn’t really matter much. All that mattered was that the cover to the metal strongbox was twisted grotesquely. As Nathan lifted the charred box up with the blade of the hoe, they could see that inside there were a few ashes remaining of what had once been twenty-five thousand dollars in St. Louis bank notes.
Joshua, face as pale as a dawning sky, turned away, holding one arm across his bandaged side, and stared blankly at the ground before him.
“How bad?” Carl asked.
Joshua shrugged, staring out the window into the darkness of the night. There were only five of the family in Joshua and Caroline’s house. The rest of the family had stayed back for now, caring for their children throughout the day and letting Benjamin and Mary Ann, Nathan and Lydia, and Carl offer what comfort they could now that it was over.
After a moment, when it became clear that Joshua was not going to respond, Nathan answered for him. “Thirty-one horses, mules, or oxen dead, near as we can count. So far they’ve rounded up three of the horses that were set free. We’re hoping to find the rest, but who knows? All the buildings are totally gone, of course.”
“Wagons?”
“Everything in the shed was destroyed. Twenty-one in all. Five of those parked outside were set afire. Maybe one or two are salvageable.”
“But I’ve got three out on the road somewhere,” Joshua said with a sarcastic bark. “So we should be all right.”
Caroline, sitting beside him, laid a hand on his. He barely noticed.
“If this were summer,” Nathan explained, “it would be the other way around. Twenty-six wagons and teams would have been out on the road and only three or so in here.”
“In the one warehouse, I had approximately fifteen thousand dollars’ worth of dry goods slated to go to Fort Leavenworth,” Joshua said without emotion. “We were going to load it up and ship it out tomorrow.” Then came another dry and bitter laugh. “I’m not sure what I’ll get out of that now. What’s charcoal selling for nowadays?”
Mary Ann gave a little murmur of pain. “You have always been so generous in helping the family, Joshua. You know we’ll stand with you now.”
His head came up. “Right. When you’re using every dime and every spare board and nail to get yourselves ready for spring.”
“We’ll do whatever has to be done,” Nathan said quietly, and all nodded their affirmation of that.
“Do you think—,” Lydia started. She hesitated, the thought almost too horrible to put into words. “Do you think Walter . . . ?”
Joshua shook his head. “No. Walter told me that our friends in Warsaw learned that I was there the day Worrell was shot. He warned me that they were going to try something.” The pain and anger on his face twisted his mouth downward. “Oh, no, Walter’s way of burning me out was much more gentle than this.”
“Don’t you think this might change his mind?” Mary Ann asked.
“It wouldn’t matter if it did or didn’t,” Joshua said harshly. “The partnership between Joshua Steed and Walter Samuelson is over.” He half turned in his chair, looking up at Nathan. “Getting down to St. Louis now is imperative, Nathan. Those other businesses are all I have left. If I lose them to the Barber boys, we’ll be without anything.”
“I understand.”
“I’m going alone. Ribs or no ribs.”
For a long moment, the two brothers stared at each other, something passing between them, then finally Nathan nodded. “All right.”
Caroline grabbed at Joshua’s arm. “I don’t want you going alone, Joshua. Now that the river’s closed, you’ll have to travel right past Warsaw. And with your ribs stove in like they are, you’re in no shape to be trying to get away if someone comes after you.”
The two brothers looked at each other, Nathan’s eyes questioning. Joshua finally nodded. “Tell her, Nathan,” Joshua finally said.
“Tell me what?”
Nathan sighed, glancing sideways at Lydia. She had not heard this as yet either. “We saw Elder Taylor as we were coming home tonight. There is some bad news.”
Lydia’s mouth tightened. “What?”
“Do you remember Solomon talking about Edmund Durfee? His was the first settlement hit by the mobs down in Yelrome.”
“Yes,” said Caroline. “Didn’t they come back the second day and burn him out again?”
“That’s the one,” Nathan said.
Lydia spoke up. “The Durfees have been in the store several times. Father Durfee asked if we might give him credit for a time, until he could gather in some of his crops. I said yes, of course.”
Nathan looked away, his countenance darkening. The Durfees had also been one of the families that he and Joshua had brought back as part of the rescue effort of the Morley Settlement. Edmund Durfee was a man of great faith who had come into the Church early in its history.
“Yesterday,” he began slowly, “Brother Durfee and some of his family went back to Yelrome to get a load of their grain. I saw him before he left, and he said that they would be safe because the state militia have been down there making sure that there are no more incidents. But evidently, our trusty militia left earlier in the day to visit friends. That was all it took. The Durfees dug some potatoes and got a load of wheat, then went to bed last night. They were staying at Solomon Hancock’s place—the boys out in the barn, and Father Durfee in the house. They were planning to leave first thing this morning.”
Lydia’s eyes had gone very round. “No,” she said.
Nathan just nodded. “About eleven o’clock, the boys heard a noise and looked outside. The mob had come in and set fire to some of the unthreshed grain. There was a wind blowing and the flames were moving in the direction of the barn. The boys ran and woke up their father and Brother Hancock.”
“They thought the mob had fled,” Benjamin spoke up. He had been there when John Taylor had given the report. “They looked around but could see no one, so they started fighting the fire and taking the horses and cows out of the stable.”
“Suddenly,” Nathan went on, “a man stepped out from behind a tree and fired one shot at Brother Hancock. They heard a shrill whistle and suddenly fifteen or twenty men who had been hiding behind the log fence stood up and started shooting. Everyone scattered, of course.” He looked down at his hands. “But Father Durfee was struck in the throat and killed instantly.”
“Oh, no!” Mary Ann gasped.
“Yes,” Joshua said, grim as death now. “They found out later that one of the mob bet another one a gallon of whiskey that he couldn’t hit the old man.”