and nose, thus making one side, at
least, of the interview as blank to him as the middle of next week.
Therefore, not a glimpse nor a sniff of the elf had Pow-wow caught; nor
had he heard a word of what the elf had said from "Will-o'-the-Wisp" to
"Nick of the Woods." His master, he could see and hear, and doubtless
marveled much that a husband and father, who had traveled hundreds of
miles to be with his wife and child again, should thus hang fire within
dinner-horn call of home, merely to hold a pow-wow with a rotten log. As
Jervis could no more see the charm on the dog than the dog the charmer
on the log, he must needs regard the orderly deportment of his dumb
companion--in whose sagacity he had unbounded confidence--as the
strongest additional evidence he could wish for confirming him in the
favorable view; his own senses had already inclined him to take off the
Manitou and the matter between them. At length his thoughts shaped
themselves into a conclusion, which he thus expressed aloud:

"I have never known a dog of Pow-wow's blood whose instinct did not tell
him when there was an enemy near his master. I have never known that man
to deceive me, nor try to deceive me, whose eye spoke with his tongue,
and before it and after it, as did the eye of the strange being here but
now. To doubt the word of such a one, were to do him a wrong. To refuse
the gift of such a one, might be to withhold a blessing from me and
mine. I will take the moccasins and trust this Nick of the Woods."

CHAPTER VI.

Temptation and Flight.

"It was the first of June, the day on which
It is as easy for the heart to be true,
As for grass to be green, or for skies to be blue."

But Sprigg's heart was too full of red moccasins for the laughing
gladness of the green fields, or the smiling delight of the blue sky, to
find any place there. What his mother had told him of the wild shapes
which haunted the forest had, for the time, caused his heart, bold as it
was for one of his years, to quake with a nameless dread, which seemed
to dog his shadow wherever he went. When the shades of night and the
hours of sleep were come, these wild remembrances took the form of
wilder dreams, which vexed and scared his slumbers till break of day.
But next day was the first of June; and the sun was too bright, and the
sky too blue, and the earth too green, for ugly dreams to linger long in
the mind, and by the time the shadows stood still