Then, too, there was Pow-wow's behavior on the occasion to be taken into consideration. There was not a dog west or east of the Alleghany Mountains who had a sharper nose than Pow-wow for detecting an ill wind; yet, all this while, he had set there on his haunches, without betraying the least sign of uneasiness or distrust, nor even of curiosity, as if a Manitou to him were a sight as familiar as a jay-bird, and no more to be barked at. Now, the real state of the case was this: Foreseeing that the dog, dog-like, would be for putting in his jaw to help his master out, the prudent elf had thrown a spell or charm upon him, hoodwinking not his eyes only, but also his ears 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."