And on the Eighth Day by Ellery Queen Page A

again, Ellery thought suddenly—a confirmation of his own fugitive recollection).
    In sum, the Teacher continued, the Crownsil of his youth in a series of solemn meetings made a decision: They must leave the abominable world in which they found themselves. Somewhere in the vast lands to the east, even if in desert wastes, their people would seek a place in which they might live, uncontaminated, as a self-contained community, in strict accordance with their own ethical and socio-economic principles.
    And so the people sold their houses and lands and businesses; wagons and supplies were purchased; and one day a great caravan left San Francisco and began the eastward trek. And this was another long, hard time.
    Their first attempt at settlement, on a verdant tract of land not far from Carson City, was disastrous. They had chosen the site because there was then no railroad to the Nevada capital and, compared with San Francisco, Carson City was a mere village. But its very smallness proved their undoing. Saloons and gambling hells and dance halls, because of the lesser scale of Carson City, proved too tempting to many who had been frightened off by the massive bawdiness of the great city on the Bay. And the strange ways of the colony brought them unwelcome visitors, who came to stare and jeer, men of foul mouths accompanying birdlike flocks of gaudy-plum-aged, shrieking women.
    Within a year the Crownsil decreed the Carson City colony a failure; they must move on. Most of their worldly assets were tied up in the land purchase and must be written off; very well, they would go where money was not merely unnecessary, but useless. They would find a place so remote, so off the beaten track, that the world would forget them—would not even know of them.
    Through many nights and days thereafter, the caravan toiled southeast. People died and were buried by the wayside. Young men and women were married. Children were born.
    Generally, the migration tried to avoid settlements. It happened once, however, that a man died after having been taken to a doctor in a frontier village. He had no family, and no one could be spared to drive his wagon, nor was there any room for his goods and gear in any of the other wagons. So everything was sold in the village for fifty silver dollars, and the wagon train moved on—not, however, before attempts were made to seduce several of the girls, to rob the Teacher’s father of the fifty silver dollars and the rest of the wagon train’s dwindling cash, to entice one couple into claiming the teams and wagons of the entire colony with promise to support the dishonest claim by perjured evidence and a venal judge and jury. All these attempts failed. The latter-day pilgrims left town with dogs turned on them, stones thrown, and guns fired to stampede their beasts.
    It was their last contact with civilization.
    Food was running low and water had run out when the tugging of their oxen, smelling the springs, brought the pioneers to the ringed hill which they were to call Crucible. Here was a veritable oasis in the desert, hidden, green, rich in water and arable soil, with space enough to grow food for all their number. And they called the valley Quenan.
    (Ellery, thinking about this later, decided that “Quenan” might be a corruption of “Canaan,” altered by the local accent and grown pronouncedly different in isolation. Though they might not possess a single copy of the Bible, the noble language of the King James Version was familiar to all nineteenth-century Americans: what more natural than that, consciously or otherwise, they should have identified their wanderings in the wilderness with those of the Children of Israel? So he was to think, but he was never to be sure.)
    In the Valley they settled, building their first rude shelters from the wood and canvas of the wagons; and here they had remained ever since.
    The exodus from San Francisco must have taken place in 1872 or 1873; from Carson City in 1873 or