“Ye coward!” she cast at him, bitter and intense. “Ye low-borned coward! Ye’re a-goin’ to quit me, mother of yore dead childern. Well, go on along. I won’t ax ye to stay. Git along.” “My granny she’s a-goin’ to take keer o’ ye,” said David Joslin. “She’ll be kind to ye, an’ ye’ll have no babies to bother over nuvver. Don’t—don’t talk to me no more. I reckon I kain’t stand no more.” He stepped to the mantel, took from it the old faded book that lay there—no more and nothing else of all in the house that had been his. Then he turned toward his own door. She heard his slow footsteps stumbling through the sodden grass. There closed behind him for the second time that evening a door opening upon what he had once called home. CHAPTER III THE BLOOD COVENANT DAVID JOSLIN turned from his own wastrel fire, his own decrepit gate, as but now he had from his father’s, and he did not look back at what he had left. Steadily his feet slushed forward, as he held his course through the dripping rain, faced now up the valley of the stream near which he lived. Here and there, on this side or that of the swollen river, showed infrequent lights at the windows of homes—each a hospitable home where he would be welcome at any time of the day or night. But he did not turn to any one of these, homeless as he was himself. For a considerable distance he kept to the valley until finally he turned into a narrow, deeply sheltered ravine which as he knew had no occupant. It was a wild, uncultivated spot, the mouth of the gulch known as Semmes’ Cove. At its foot trickled a stream of water leading far back into the hills through a district where as yet home-building man had not come. The tall trees still stood here unreaped—the giant white oaks and the tremendous trees known as “old-time poplar,” among which not even the slightest garnering had as yet been done by timber-hunting man. There were secrets of a certain sort up this gulch, as David Joslin knew. Few men openly went into the mouth of this wild ravine, and there was no definite path up the creek such as marked most of the others thereabout. None the less Joslin in the darkness of the night turned into it as one wholly familiar with the vicinity.