Susannah looked at the fat, bright-eyed man who was no longer looking at her. "I know" (her voice fell with a strange gentleness through the thickened atmosphere of the room) "that there are many malicious stories abroad about the dishonesty of our people which are not true."
But as she went up the stair she remembered that she had heard of no case where reformation of character had been followed by the returning of the fourfold. Most of these saints of the new sect had before their conversion been, like her husband, already God-fearing and righteous, but in cases where, like their leader, they had been reclaimed from evil courses, had they not been satisfied with offering the present and future to God, leaving the past? She had heard of no case of restitution such as Finney insisted upon.
Susannah entered the low, wide room in which she lived. The chimney from the lower room passed up and was always warm. She went and laid her cold hands against the rough plaster that covered its bricks, and, being tired, she leaned, laying her cheek too against its warm surface. The one candle cast but a faint light upon the chairs, the bed, the table. The small panes of the window-glass were bare to the darkness without and the empty tree-branches. The heavy latch of the closed door was fastened crookedly for lack of good workmanship.
Her unsatisfied mind ached for counsel, and her thought, roving over the world, could fix only on Ephraim as she had at first learned to know him, wise and quiet and kind. The warm chimney seemed a poor thing to lean her head against while she felt that her faith was failing. Then the remembrance of the shot Ephraim had fired and his callousness choked back her tears.
She waited an hour, two hours; then, becoming anxious on Halsey's account, she borrowed a lantern and went across the fields to Knight's farmhouse.
Quite a number of people had gathered. Susannah met some of them coming from the house, but others were still there, standing about the fire in the kitchen. She heard that the later arrivals had all been disappointed of the sight of Newell Knight in his fit. Halsey had assumed authority, stating that it was indeed a case of possession, and that none but those who were strong in faith and in the power of prayer must come near the possessed. The craving of the visitors for excitement was only fed by the sound of the young man's voice, heard at short intervals.
He cried aloud, sometimes shrieking that he was being taken into "the pit" and that Joseph Smith could alone deliver him, sometimes exclaiming in a strange voice that he was no longer Newell Knight but a demon, and sometimes only moaning and gibbering words that no one could understand.
Halsey came out to Susannah. "Wouldst thou see him?" he asked tenderly. "The sight will distress thee, for it is truly terrible to see with the eye of flesh the power of hell, and yet I cannot forbid thee if thou wouldst come, for perchance the Lord may mean it for our edification."
Susannah went with him into the inner room, hardly knowing why she went, but probably impelled by the instinctive desire to relieve suffering which was part of her womanhood. The young man's father and mother, together with two or three Mormon converts, were kneeling upon the floor, saying prayers for the sufferer in more or less audible, more or less agonised tones.
The young man lay upon a pallet-bed, in what would have been called by the medical science of the time "convulsions." His eyeballs were rolled upwards in a manner most disfiguring to his face. His hands were clenched. Halsey no sooner entered the room than he, too, fell upon his knees, lifting his face upward as if in silent and fervent prayer.