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Show 256 prickly and defensive, replied that it probably didn't matter which leg you put in your pants first as long as all three got there eventually. Secretly he had to admit, however, that he had lost his head. Excited by Alice's response to the story of Joseph Smith seeing through his fingertips, he had skipped over the contents of the vision and told the story of the Mormon family in Cache Valley who were wakened one night in 1915 by the sound of hoofbeats outside their door and went out to find a stranger on a white horse who handed the father an envelope and galloped off into the night. The envelope contained a slip of paper on which was written, in a handwriting they had never seen before, the news that their son had been killed in France. Months later the family received an official communication from Washington saying their son had been killed, and that he had died on the very day and at precisely the hour that the father on the other side of the globe had been handed the envelope by the stranger on horseback. Then he had told the story of the farm wife in the early days of settlement in Payson, south of the Salt Lake Valley, who was visited one Christmas eve by a white-haired stranger asking for food. Her husband was in Germany on a mission for the church and there was not much food in the house, but she wrapped part of a fresh loaf of bread in a piece of old calico and gave it to him. He thanked her and went away; when she looked out the window he had vanished, and when she stepped outside to see where he had gone there were no tracks in the snow. Alice had said that part gave her goosebumps, but it had gotten better. Several years later, after the woman's husband was back from his mission, she found the piece of calico in his trunk and asked him where he had gotten it. He told her a stranger with white hair had handed it to him one Christmas eve while he was standing hungry and demoralized on a street corner in Karlsruhe, and it had been wrapped around |
