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.
It was perhaps ten o’clock of the second morning, when he found himself on the river trail of a fork of the Kentucky River, that he paused at the sound of a human voice. It seemed not to be approaching, but stationary—a woman’s voice, now raised in some sort of old ballad tune. It seemed to him he might go forward.
She sat on a pallet of leaves at the side of the road, a little above its level, in a sort of natural cave or opening in the cliff face. A shelf of limestone extended out perhaps twenty feet, and left under it a sort of open-faced cavern. The roof was black with many smokes—it always had been black with smoke since the memory of white men in that region; for here, tradition told, had dwelt the last two Indians of the Cumberlands, when the whites rallied and slew them both. This white woman had taken up the ancient lair of men scarce more wild than she herself seemed now.