Susannah ran a long way, then, breathless and exhausted, found that she had missed a turning and gone much too far.  Afraid lest she should lose herself by mistaking even the main direction in which she wanted to go, and that while out of reach of any respectable house she might again be assailed by members of the mob, she came back, walking with more caution.  She had no hope now of being the means of bringing help.  She had come farther from the village instead of nearing it, and what few neighbours there were, having failed to interfere, were evidently inimical.

When she found the right turning she again heard the shouts of some assaulting party, and, creeping within the shadow of trees, she waited.

At length they passed her, straggling along the road, shouting and singing, carrying with them some garments which, in rough horse-play, they were tearing into fragments.  When the last had turned his back to where she stood she crept out, running again like a hunted thing, fearing what she might find as the result of their work.  To increase her distress the thought came that it was more than possible that like work had been going on at Kirtland that night.  Tears of unutterable indignation and pitiful love came to her eyes at the thought that Angel, too, might be suffering this shameful treatment.  Across some acres of open ground she saw the Smiths’ house, doors and windows lit by candles.  Thither she was hastening when, in the black space of the nearer field, she almost fell upon a whitish form, grotesque and horrible, which was rising from the ground.

“Who is it?” asked Joseph Smith.

He stood up now, but not steadily; his voice was weak, as if he had been stunned, and his utterance indistinct because his mouth had apparently received some injury.  She thought of nothing now but that he was Angel’s master, and that Angel might be in like plight.

“What have they done?  What is the matter?” she whispered tenderly, tears in her voice.

“Is it you?” he asked curiously.  He said nothing for a minute and then, “They’ve covered me with the tar and emptied a feather-bed on me.  If ye’d have the goodness to tell Brother Johnson to come out to me, Mrs. Halsey—­”

“They have hurt you other ways,” she said tremulously, “you are bruised.”

“A man don’t like to own up to having been flogged, ye see; but Peter and Paul and all of them had to stand it in their time, so I don’t know why a fellow like me need be shamefaced over it.  But if you’d be good enough, Mrs. Halsey, to go and tell Emmar that I ain’t much hurt, and send Brother Johnson out with some clothes or a blanket—­”

He stopped without adding that he would feel obliged.  As she went she heard him say with another sort of unsteadiness in his tone, “It’s real kind of you to care for me that much.”

In her excitement she did not know that she was weeping bitterly until she found herself surrounded by other shuddering and weeping women in Emma’s room; for other of the converts in Hiram, hearing of the violence abroad, had crept to this house for mutual safety and aid.