It was quite dark when Dan Nicholls got home that night, out-in-the-woods dark. So it wasn't until Nicholls got out of his car and saw one of the shadows twitch that he realized there was a man standing silently in his front yard. Nicholls was startled at first. Then he saw the man had a backpack. Whew: a hiker.

Nicholls, who lives in Hewitt, N.J., expects hikers. He invites them, in fact, with signs he posts on a nearby ridgeline where the famed Appalachian Trail crosses from rural southern New York to rural northern New Jersey.

"I own a log cabin east of here, down the ridge," this one said. "You hikers are welcome to use an outdoor, rustic, but with privacy, hot/cold SHOWER/stall."

It's bait, truth be told. Nicholls is an evangelical Christian, and he uses the promise of running water and a hot meal as an opening to proselytize about "the new, fantastic water, which is life in Christ."

You hungry? he asked the hiker in the dark.

Was he ever. The hiker introduced himself as David, though he was using the "trail name" of Injun, in honor of some Native American heritage. The hiker talked while he downed a cold Snapple and two hamburgers in Nicholls's kitchen, and it soon became obvious to his host that Injun's potential was stunning. Nobody had ever walked off the trail so ready for the Lord.

To wit: Injun described himself as a drug user at the end of his rope. His family had abandoned him, he claimed. He had driven from his home in Rhode Island to a trailhead north of New York City, resolving to walk south awhile and then kill himself.

That was more than 10 days before. Now he was very hungry -- Injun said he had recently eaten both a rattlesnake and a turtle -- but still not dead. And Injun said it wasn't just hunger that had brought him down off the trail. He had felt strangely drawn to Nicholls's place, and even more so after he saw some of the Christian tracts that Nicholls keeps in a little waterproof box in the shower.

"To me . . . it was totally arranged by God," Nicholls said later, remembering that night. "So you just go with it."

Nicholls started talking about redemption. The two watched a Christian video starring TV-sitcom-star-turned-evangelist Kirk Cameron, "Hell's Best Kept Secret." And, at the end of the night, before Injun sacked out in a spare bed, Nicholls offered this suggestion: Why not spend the night praying?

By morning, the conversion was complete. The hiker was crying and laughing so much that his face started to ache. He was saying that this was the most beautiful day of his life. He even, in the spirit of the moment, felt moved to confess a pair of very recent sins.

One was theft: While he had waited for Nicholls to arrive home the previous night, he had stolen tomatoes from his