Such, unnatural and hard as that might seem to others, was the ancient, grim, uncompromising creed of David Joslin of the Cumberlands. Let the dead bury its dead. Let the living live their own lives. Weakly, slowly, he climbed along the mountain side above the creek bed, to avoid any passerby, and so at length reached the point upon the opposing hill whence he might look down upon the little home once owned by the man who lay there now, under the drying yellow ridge in the apple orchard planted by his sires. How long David Joslin sat here, his chin in his hands, he himself might not have told. He sat looking down, pondering, resolving.... Yes, he was born again! What must he do? At length he rose, staggeringly rose, seeking about for some broken branch to aid him further in his journey. For now he purposed a long, long journey out from these hills. He was going away from his own people! His hand fell against something hard in the side pocket of his ragged coat. It was the old book he had borrowed of his father—the well-thumbed volume of Calvin’s Institutes. His belt and revolver were gone—he knew not where—but here was this ancient, iron book. He recalled now, with the tenacious memory of the mountaineer, a passage which he had read therein: Truly, I have no refuge but in Him. Let no man flatter himself, for of himself he is only a devil. For what have you of your own but sin? Take for yourself sin, which is your own. Your righteousness belongs to God. Nature is wounded, distressed and ruined. It needs a true confession, not a false defense. “A true confession—not a false defense!” All the honesty, all the ignorance, all the hope of these mountains were in the mind of David Joslin, as he repeated these vague words of the old mystic to himself. He now felt himself a prophet. And now, a prophet, he was going out into the world. CHAPTER VI THE WANDERING WOMEN WHEN Joslin finally rose and set his face away from the sight of the hearth fire he had known, with staff and scrip to start out into the world, he followed along the winding height of land below the summit leading towards Hell-fer-Sartin—the objective of his father’s last circuit riding. Here he crossed the Bull Skin Valley, fording the shallow stream, and made directly into the harder going of the divide between that stream and the Redbird. Feeding himself as best he might, he lay out yet another night in the hills; but by this time the seasoned vigor of his own frame began to reassert itself. He grew stronger in spite of the pain of his wound, in spite of his long abstention from wholesome food. He evaded all sounds of life at the little farms scattered here and there among the mountains. A rail fence caused him to turn aside; the sight of a smoke drove him deeper back into the hills.