“But when I moved a bit he saw me, and he started at first as if I’d been going to shoot him, thinking no doubt that I was an enemy spying on him.  At that, because my disease had weakened me, and because I seemed to feel nothing all through me but the grief that he was bearing, I began to cry like a child.

“Then he stretched out his hands towards the city and I heard him say, ’My Lord, thou hast given me this people, and if I leave them without a shepherd they will be stricken and scattered and robbed by the destroyer.’

“So then in a few minutes he held out his hand to me, so gentlemanlike, as if I was as good as him, and he said, ’Come, my friend, let us go back, and let God determine what we shall do or suffer.’  So we went and got on the ferry-boat and went back, and I never spoke to him; but I went with him all the way to his house.

“The next morning I heard that he and Mr. Hyrum were going to set off for Carthage to be tried.  So I got a horse and went to Carthage before them, for I felt then that I cared for nothing but to see the prophet again.  But I heard tell how, as they went along, their wives and their friends went with them part way, and they turned back two or three times as they were parting from them, for the prophet said that they would never see his face again.

“Governor Ford he met them at Carthage with a great to-do.  He pledged the honour of the State that they should be safe, and he had the troops drawn upon either side, and he passed down between them with the prophet and Mr. Hyrum and showed them himself into the gaol.  The prophet said that it was illegal to put them in the gaol, for it was a civil matter, and Governor Ford said, for I heard him, that it was because they would be safer there.  I was standing just behind the line of soldiers jostling up with the crowd, and I heard the Governor say, ’I pledge you my honour, and the faith and honour of this State, that no harm shall come to you while undergoing this imprisonment.’  So then they were shut in; but the crowd and the soldiers remained in the streets, and I heard enough to know that harm would come.

“The next morning the Governor went away from Carthage, to be out of it, and that day, in the afternoon, a mob of men with faces painted like Indians came out with guns, and we knew that their purpose was to murder the prophet.  I went to the gaol and sat upon the steps, and the militia, which was called the Carthage Greys, came out, and halted, about eight rods from the gaol, and I thought at first that they would fire on the mob when they came, but they never moved, but stood and looked on.  So the murder was done by them all in cold blood as well as by the mob.”

“Did you see him die?” asked Susannah with white lips.