om the house, and
evidently in quest of their boy, Jervis, somewhat alarmed himself,
hastened forward to meet her and inquire into the occasion of so
unwonted a circumstance.

"Ah! dear Jervis!" cried she, with tearful eyes and tremulous voice,
while yet her husband was coming, "You are returning, and our boy not
with you! I was hoping he might have heard the report of your rifle or
Pow-wow's bark and had gone forth to meet you, as he often delights in
doing!" Then she went on to tell how Sprigg, about 1 o'clock, had left
the house to fetch a pail of water from their favorite but more distant
spring, down there in the edge of the woods. Her mind becoming wholly
occupied with her work at the loom, she had quite lost sight of the
little circumstance, when, all at once, it had struck her that it had
now been several hours since Sprigg had left the house, nor had yet
returned. Whereat she had left off her weaving and gone forth to see
what had become of him. She had searched the clearing all around the
house, and the woods all around the clearing; yet not a trace of him had
she discovered, saving the empty bucket at the spring.

By the time the story was ended, which she told with many an anxious
detail, they had passed on by the house and reached the spring. In the
course of the day's chase the hunter had come upon a fresh Indian trail,
which made him at first apprehensive that the boy, while thus out of
sight and hearing of home, might have been crept upon and captured by
some lurking band of savages. But there were no traces at the spring,
nor near it, to justify his apprehension; nor yet that of his having
fallen a prey to wild beasts--the two sources of danger being, in those
days, always coupled in the minds of our pioneer progenitors. The prints
of the boy's bare feet were plainly enough to be seen in the path that
led down the hill; but here, at the spring, without any sign of their
having retraced themselves, they suddenly vanished. For once the
hunter's clear-seeing eye and his dog's keen-scenting nose were utterly
baffled. Those Manitou moccasins being, as you must remember, charmed,
could be worn and leave no trace of their wearer behind them that sight
of man or scent of dog could discern, be it footprint on the ground or
odor in the air. What manner of disappearance might this be?

All in a state of wonderment now, as well as distress, they hastened
back to the house, if, happily, some nook or corner had bee