Siler treated the boy kindly, and paid him five or six dollars for his help. When he reached the end of his journey, he tried to persuade Davy to stay with him. At first Davy thought it his father’s wish that he should remain, so for some weeks he tried to be content; but the yearning to see his family again was strong within him. One day, as he was playing in the road, there came along three familiar faces, those of a man named Dunn and two sons, each with a good team. The sight of them was like a sight of home, for they were bound to Knoxville, and the way led past the lowly Crockett inn, and Davy was soon telling his plight to sympathetic listeners. As his disappearance in the daytime would soon be known and might result in his being brought back, they told him that if he could get to the place where they were to put up for the night, seven miles away, they would take him home. All the tiresome journey there, Davy had come on foot, and at the prospect of riding all the way back, heaven opened before him. To his delight, he found that the “good old Dutchman and his family” had gone to a neighbor’s. Davy’s own story of what followed is this: “I gathered my clothes and what little money I had, and put them all together under the head of my bed. I went to bed early that night, but I could not sleep. For though I was a wild boy, yet I dearly loved my father and mother, and I could not sleep for thinking of them. And then the fear that I should be discovered and called to a halt filled me with anxiety: and between my childish love of home, on the one hand, and the fears of which I have spoken, on the other, I felt mighty queer.” It was three hours before daylight when Davy crawled out of his bed. He got away from the house without waking any one, and found it snowing hard, eight inches having already fallen. In the absence of moonlight, it was a difficult matter to reach the main highway, half a mile off; but once in that, he steered his way towards the place appointed, guided by the opening made through the woods. He was two hours trudging through snow up to his knees, and as his tracks were covered as fast as they were made, the Siler family must have wondered at his disappearance. Davy found the Dunns up and feeding their teams, and was kindly received. As he warmed himself by the fire, he forgot his struggle with the storm in his thankfulness for their goodness and help. As soon as breakfast was over, the wagoners set out, and the boy found himself counting the seemingly endless miles of the homeward journey. When they reached the Roanoke valley, his desire to get home was too great for him to endure the slow progress of the loaded wagons. He could travel twice as fast afoot, so at the house of John Cole, on the Roanoke, he thanked his kind friends for what they had done for him, and started out alone on what must have been a tramp of three hundred miles.