Page:Resurrection Rock (1920).pdf/369

 trees on the State lands. They bought one section and set up a mill and cut over the square miles all around—eight sections or ten or twenty; as long and as broad as they dared. Lucas Cullen was one of these men. He had nothing against my father until my father bought from and paid the government for five hundred acres of standing timber which he found, when he came to it, that Lucas Cullen was cutting. This caused trouble for Cullen when my father asked for a refund on his purchase money; not actually serious trouble; for Cullen had too much influence and too much power of intimidation for that. But it brought Cullen's anger on my father; Cullen couldn't see why the Mormon must be so particular; if he had found five hundred acres of his own being cut, why didn't he say nothing and just cut off a thousand of the State land somewhere else?

"But the Mormon Drane couldn't do that; and the Mormon Drane—whatever lies Cullen told against him—had one wife only. She was my mother. She knew that Richard Drane had been reared a Mormon; but, because of the hatred and fear bred by Strang's Kingdom, he had concealed it from others till Lucas Cullen found it out and spread it about with lies—lies—lies. One of the lies, which proved in the end the most dangerous, was that the Mormon had lust for the wife of another lumberman, Henry Laylor."

As she spoke, Agnes Cullen came forward and showed herself more plainly in the light. No one—not even Lucas Cullen, in his guilt-clouded consciousness—believed her a phantom now. Agnes Drane, his enemy, had returned to stand before him and accuse him to his family and neighbors and intimates and her own. He could reason, if he halted his whirling thoughts,