Then, as the cool of the night refreshed him, he felt about him, felt the weeping of dew-damp leaves above him, and slowly reasoned that he was not dead at all, and not in his grave, but that he had been flung somewhere here into the bottom of the ravine. Slowly he struggled to his knees. He staggered up the side of the slope as best he might, more by chance than otherwise, taking that side which lay nearest the dance house. He saw in the gloom the low boulders, behind which his fighting men had lain. He stumbled across the dead body of Calvin Trasker, left where he had fallen. There remained to him sensibility enough to put the dead man’s hat across his face; but he could do no more than that. He knew that if he were found here he would be killed indeed. So, knowing that there was no longer need for him or chance for him here, he staggered on down the ravine of Semmes’ Cove, until at length he could go no farther, and so fell once more unconscious. When again he awoke it was broad sunshine. How long he had lain he could not tell. But now thirst assailed him, thirst which he might quench in the trickle of water which lay below. The provender of the woods, a few nuts, a pawpaw or so, seemed grateful to him now. He staggered on, knowing that it would be no more than two or three miles down the ravine until he came to the little camp he had made in the rain, after he had left his own home on that unhappy day. And so at length he found that bivouac and dropped into the bed of rotten wood once more, and lay prostrate all that day and the next. It was really upon the morning of the fourth day after the encounter—although Joslin himself could not have said as to that—that, strong enough now to walk, he staggered out of the thicket-covered lower entrance of Semmes’ Cove into the little creek bed, which made the path to his father’s home. He must look once more at the house where he himself was born. Was born, did he say? No, he had been born a second time! In these long hours of misery and pain, David Joslin had taken accounting as best he might with life and the philosophies thereof. In his fashion of thought, he had gained the conviction that his “call” had come to him. He was called for a different life. There was no doubt about it. New duties lay before him—all of a new life—because he had been born again! To him his salvation was not less than a miracle, and he accepted it as such solemnly and reverently, feeling himself now consecrated fully for some cause. What the form of that consecration might be he himself did not clearly know as yet. But there came to him, with this feeling, the solemn conviction that he must leave this country. This opportunity seemed to him providential. No, he would not even go to say farewell to his wife, nor to greet his grandma, Granny Joslin, to give counsel to her. He, being dead, must depart secretly forever from these hills until he might return to them to do the thing given him to do.