"I don't recollect that he ever failed in his importuning to heal the sick."
Once, when David and Wilford Woodruff were traveling together, they were called to the bedside of a sick woman, Margaret Tittle, who lay at the point of death. Preaching the Gospel to her, David received a promise that if healed she would be baptized. After being administered to by the servants of the Lord, she was restored to perfect health instantly, when she refused baptism.
They told her she was acting a dangerous part and would again be attacked if she did not repent. Returning that way in a few days, they found her very low again, when she again promised, but this time with more sincerity, for after being healed the second time, she was led into the water and baptized, by Wilford Woodruff.
On August 20th, David preached at the house of Randolph Alexander, and after meeting baptized him and his wife.
The spirit of mobocracy seemed always to have aroused in David all the resentment of which he was capable. At one time while holding a meeting in Pads, Tennessee, as related by President Woodruff, a mob gathered in the place of meeting with threats of violence. Instead, however, of being intimidated by their presence, David denounced their undertaking in the most unmeasured terms and in the spirit of prophecy, though the fulfillment in the Civil War was then more than twenty-five years away, predicted:
"Before you die some of you will see the streets of Paris run with the blood of its own citizens."
How fearfully this prophecy was fulfilled in the capture of Paris in 1862 by General Morgan, during his famous raid through Kentucky and Tennessee!
Early in September, the seven branches of the Church in Kentucky and Tennessee, representing one hundred and thirty-three members, assembled in conference on Damon's Creek, Calloway County, Kentucky, Thomas B. Marsh, as President of the Twelve Apostles, presiding. On the third day of the conference, David preached on repentance and baptism, and at the close of the meeting, five persons came forward and asked to be baptized.
Directly after conference, David with his wife took leave of the Saints and his fellow laborers, and returned in safety with Thomas B. Marsh and companion, Elisha H. Groves, to Missouri.
In leaving the field of his labors of the past six months, in company with Elisha H. Groves, who had first conferred upon him authority to enter the missionary field, it was but natural that David should retrospectively contemplate the work to which his life had been so wholly given over since that lonely ride through the woods from Michigan to Indiana. His first disappointing missionary labors among his friends and acquaintances in Michigan, when he expected all of them to rejoice with him in the great light newly burst upon the world; the first visit to the Prophet Joseph, followed by the two successive missions in the East; his winter's journey with William D. Pratt; his labors in Missouri and in the South; his ordination to the Apostleship with the wonderful feast of blessings and endowments that followed; the return to the South, just terminated all these reflections crowded upon him with all their accompanying memories of toil and privation, with all the accompanying memories of the powers and blessings the Lord had bestowed upon him; and there was no room in his soul for anything but gratitude. Not only so, but there was a more settled resolution to persevere to the end; and it was probably on this journey back to Missouri that in David's mind the nature of that end was predetermined.