“I was in an awful hobble,” Davy wrote of this, “for my father was in a condition to make the fur fly. He called on me to tell why I had not been to school. I told him that I was afraid to go, for I knew I should be cooked up to a cracklin’ in no time. My father told me, in a very angry manner, that he would whip me an eternal sight worse if I didn’t start at once to school.” While Davy was begging not to be sent back, the elder Crockett was cutting a stout hickory switch, and from past experience the boy knew what this meant. At his father’s first move towards him, he broke into a run. The chase lasted a mile, when the boy dodged aside into the bushes, and his father then gave up the hunt. Davy had been careful to lead off in a course away from the school-house, having a keen idea of his fate if both the teacher and his father should get him at the same time. Fearing to return, Davy kept on for several miles and put up for the night at the house of a man who was about to start for Virginia with a drove of cattle. The boy at once hired out to go with him, and before starting one of the older Crockett boys joined them. Thus was Davy again a pilgrim, with a journey of nearly four hundred miles before him. The trail they followed was probably about the same as the route of the Norfolk & Western Railroad of the present time, through Abingdon, Wytheville, and Blue Ridge Springs, to Lynchburg, passing south of Hanging Rock, to which place Davy had travelled the previous year. From Lynchburg the drove went on to Charlottesville and Orange Court House, up the headwaters of the Rapidan, again through the Blue Ridge Mountains, to Front Royal, on the Shenandoah River, where the stock was sold. Davy and a brother of the man with whom he had started out, with a single horse for the two, now took the homeward trail. They were together three days, travelling with so little rest that the boy finally told the man to go ahead, and that he would come when he got ready. He bought some provisions with four dollars that the man had given him for the four hundred miles’ journey, and plodded stolidly along until he met a wagoner who lived in Tennessee, and who intended to return after his trip was finished. He was bound for Winchester, not very far away, and as he was a jolly sort of fellow, Davy gladly accepted his offer to take him along. Two days later they met Davy’s brother and the rest of the former party, but Davy refused to go with them. He says that he could not help shedding tears, as he watched his brother disappear, but the thought of the schoolmaster, and of his angry father with the big hickory switch, was too potent.