Longarm and the Shoshoni silver

He checked the coffeepot, saw it had to simmer some more, and added, "So much for tales of Brother Brigham sending his Danites or Avenging Angels after anyone who told tales out of school. That twenty-seventh wife was on a regular vaudeville circuit, with handbills and posters distributed well ahead to let everyone know just where she'd be mean-mouthing the Mormons next. Whether they cared or not they never bothered her, and she still lectures on the tedious topic of a dead man's desire for her fair white body now and again. The public ain't as interested as it once was, now that a second generation of Mormons seem to be running Utah Territory with a tad less zeal."

Dame Flora didn't seem at all convinced, and by the time the coffee had been brewed and drunk she'd told a tale that had Longarm a tad worried as well.

Like other churches, the Latter-day Saints sent missionaries out to save the heathens in outlandish parts of the world. But maybe because they were starting from sort of an outlandish part themselves, the Great American Desert, Mormon missionaries did a lot of converting in the British Isles. There the heathens started out with the advantage of already knowing how to read The Book, and a bemused local government was more likely to send Captain Richard

Burton than a whole U.S. Cavalry column to investigate any problems.

Burton had figured he'd done enough with the publication of his City of the Saints, in which he allowed he'd found the Mormons not better nor worse than most bloody Yanks. But Dame Flora had been sent to follow up on more disturbing recent rumors about the final fates of Scotch spinster gals who'd been recruited by mail as Mormon converts and harem beauties.

When Longarm chuckled at the picture. Dame Flora sternly pointed out that she found it more pathetic than silly, since it seemed all too true most of the women involved were either too long in the tooth or simply too plain to get any Scotchman to look at them. The much better-looking Dame Flora said the new converts had been required to pay their own way over sea and land to far-off romantic Deseret, where they'd be claimed as brides by Mormon planters or ranchers too busy with their vast estates to ride into town to meet gals like everyone else did.

Longarm's eyebrows didn't go up high till Dame Flora got to the part about dowries. It seemed these mysterious Mormon moguls weren't ready to marry just any old gal, hard up as they might be. The lonesome spinsters from far-off Aberdeen and Inverness were supposed to show up with substantial dowries, at least a hundred pounds, five hundred bucks as they counted money in Deseret.

Longarm agreed that sounded substantial in a West where a dance-hall gal could usually find a plain-but honest husband if she wanted to, wasn't deformed, and took a bath at least once a week.

He explained, "The Mormons don't convert by mail order, ma'am. I've known some Mormon missionaries both sensible and pesky, so I can tell you they convert in person, on the spot. The Salt Lake Temple sends young elders out in teams, and I know they got a regular mission in London Town. You'd have to ask Salt Lake if they've built one up in Scotland by now."

She said, "We have asked. They informed us they've saved some souls, as they put it, in our industrial area around Glasgow. They deny any knowledge of Mormon missionaries operating in the Highlands and, like you, claim they've never heard of any Mormons sending for mail-order brides, with or without dowries."

So Longarm said, "There you go then, ma'am. Someone's played a cruel hoax on lonesome Scotch gals. Most likely from somewhere way closer to Scotland. Sounds like a college-boy prank to me."

"Not a few envelopes with American stamps and Salt Lake City postmarks have been forwarded to my society by worried relatives of the missing girls," she said, "We're talking about at least two dozen missing girls, as of my leaving for your own country with Angus and Jeannie here. Like yourself and Black Dick Burton before us, we found the Mormon authorities friendly and cooperative, or pretending to be, when we arrived in Salt Lake City a week ago."

"They learned their lesson during the Mormon Wars," the gentile called Rhinegold chimed in. Then he winked and said, "It's like fighting smoke with a club. The main temple claims to keep files on every Mormon and all his ancestors back to Adam, but as soon as Miss Flora here got to asking about Mormons on her list, they dummied up and said they'd never heard of any of 'em!"

Dame Flora nodded firmly. Longarm suggested, "It works as well another way, ma'am. Using the U.S. mails to defraud is a federal offense, and it can't be all that legal under the laws of Utah. So might it not be logical for a rascal out to hoax a lady by mail to write her under an assumed name?"