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.

For a moment Susannah felt impelled to follow his example.  “But perhaps,” she thought to herself, “cold water upon the patient’s head, or a warm foot-bath—­” Such suggestions caused her to resist the impulse to join the praying band, and, having resisted it, she suddenly experienced, as one feels a fresh breeze entering a close room, a strong, clear sense of knowledge that in this matter, at least, her husband was deluded, that the friends had better rise from their knees and betake themselves to ruder remedies.

Susannah had never learned to command; she had never even learned to advise.  She had too much reverence to speak aloud, disturbing those who were at prayer.  She stood hesitating, and then, in very low tones, whispered her belief in her husband’s ear.

No doubt Halsey was shocked at his wife’s unbelief; perhaps by the law of telepathy, for whose existence some psychical experts vouch, his thought penetrated the mind of the sensitive upon the bed.  Whatever the cause, Newell Knight sat up and pointed at Susannah, crying aloud that he saw the devil about to seize upon her.  So excited was the mental atmosphere, so vivid were the sufferer’s words and the effect of his pointing finger, or, perhaps, so substantial was his vision, that more than one of the saints afterwards averred that they had seen the Evil One about to embrace Susannah.  But they did not agree in the description of his form.

Halsey wrapped his arms about his wife, and led her like a child from the room and from the house.  She hardly had time to speak before she saw the night again about her.  He set her down upon an old log that chanced to lie against Knight’s barn, kneeling beside her.  There, when they were alone in the darkness, he invoked that name to which throughout all Christendom the devils are believed to be subject.