The boy, weary of his wanderings, consented to the arrangement, and engaged to work for Mr. Wilson for six months, in payment for which, the note was to be delivered up to his father.  It was characteristic of David that whatever he undertook he engaged in with all his might.  He was a rude, coarse boy.  It was scarcely possible, with his past training, that he should be otherwise.  But he was very faithful in fulfilling his obligations.  Though his sense of right and wrong was very obtuse, he was still disposed to do the right so far as his uncultivated conscience revealed it to him.

For six months, David worked for Mr. Wilson with the utmost fidelity and zeal.  He then received the note, presented it to his father, and, before he was sixteen years of age, stood up proudly his own man.  His father had no longer the right to whip him.  His father had no longer the right to call upon him for any service without paying him for it.  And on the other hand, he could no longer look to his father for food or clothing.  This thought gave him no trouble.  He had already taken care of himself for two years, and he felt no more solicitude in regard to the future than did the buffalo’s calf or the wolf’s whelp.

Wilson was a bad man, dissipated and unprincipled.  But he had found David to be so valuable a laborer that he offered him high wages if he would remain and work for him.  It shows a latent, underlying principle of goodness in David, that he should have refused the offer.  He writes: 

“The reason was, it was a place where a heap of bad company met to drink and gamble; and I wanted to get away from them, for I know’d very well, if I staid there, I should get a bad name, as nobody could be respectable that would live there.”

About this time a Quaker, somewhat advanced in years, a good, honest man, by the name of John Kennedy, emigrated from North Carolina, and selecting his four hundred acres of land about fifteen miles from John Crockett’s, reared a log hut and commenced a clearing.  In some transaction with Crockett he took his neighbor’s note for forty dollars.  He chanced to see David, a stout lad of prepossessing appearance, and proposed that he should work for him for two shillings a day taking him one week upon trial.  At the close of the week the Quaker expressed himself as highly satisfied with his work, and offered to pay him with his father’s note of forty dollars for six months’ labor on his farm.

David knew full well how ready his father was to give his note, and how slow he was to pay it.  He was fully aware that the note was not worth, to him, the paper upon which it was written.  But he reflected that the note was an obligation upon his father, that he was very poor, and his lot in life was hard.  It certainly indicated much innate nobility of nature that this boy, under these circumstances, should have accepted the offer of the Quaker.  But David did this.  For six months he labored assiduously, without the slightest hope of reward, excepting that he would thus relieve his father, whom he had no great cause either to respect or love, from the embarrassment of the debt.