Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/79

 Temple watching over their good. There would be only virgins to serve him, virgins to carry forth his revelations into the light, virgins to feed him and attend his will. Then he entered into the Temple and no man ever saw him again. He became an Invisible Presence and there were converts to the faith and children born in New Jerusalem who had never seen Cyrus Spragg and so came to think of him as God.

But in New Jerusalem dissension and wrangling broke out even in the family of the Prophet himself, for his third son, Uriah, was unlike the others and would take no part in the plan, and went about muttering against his father. He and the Prophet's youngest daughter, Annie Spragg, who never left the side of her mother, talked bitterly against their father, even though their brothers upbraided and beat them, until at last the tired mother, with her favorite children, Uriah and Annie, left the squabbles of the Palace and went to live by themselves in a house on the borders of the colony. It was there the defeated old woman died at last calling on the Prophet to leave the Temple and visit her. But he never came, for God could not appear among his people. When she was buried, Uriah Spragg and his sister fled the colony one dark night, and with them went Miss Amelia Bossert and her four sons, for she was an old woman now and when the Prophet failed to choose her among those to serve him in the Temple, she uttered blasphemies that caused her to be driven from New Jerusalem. She went to Omaha to live and supported her four sons by sewing. One of them became a senator. 