The boy said, “No”; that he was going home to dinner soon. “Come right up to my house,” said the stranger, “and I’ll give you a good dinner there, and will bring you home again in the morning.”
So the boy went with him up the river until they came to a house, when they went in, and the man’s wife and the other people there were very glad to see him, and gave him a fine dinner, and were very kind to him.
While they were eating, another boy that the boy knew very well came in and spoke to him, so that he felt very much at home.
After dinner he played with the other children, and slept there that night, and in the morning, after breakfast, the man got ready to take him home. They went down a path that had a cornfield on one side and a peach orchard on the other, until they came to another trail, and the man said, “Go along this trail across that ridge and you will come to the river road that will bring you straight to your home, and now I’ll go back to the house.”
So the man went back to the house, and the boy went on along the trail, but when he had gone a little distance he looked back, and there was no cornfield or orchard or fence or house; nothing but trees on the mountainside. He thought it rather queer, but somehow he was not frightened, and went on until he came to the river trail in sight of his house. There were a great many people standing about talking, and when they saw him they ran toward him shouting, “Here he is! He is not drowned or killed in the mountains!” They told him that they had been hunting him ever since yesterday noon, and asked him where he had been. He told them the story of what had happened, and they said there is no house there, and it was the Nunnehi that had you with them.
Once four Nunnehi women came to dance at Nottely town, and danced half of the night with the young men there, and nobody knew that they were Nunnehi, but thought them visitors from another settlement. About midnight they left to go home, and some men who had come out from the town-house to cool off watched to see which way they went. They saw the women go down the trail to the river ford, but just as they came to the water they disappeared, although it was a plain trail, with no place where they could hide. Then the watchers knew that they were Nunnehi. At another time a man was crossing over from Nottely to Hemptown, in Georgia, and heard a drum and the songs of dancers in the hills on one side of the trail. He rode to see who could be dancing in such a place, but when he reached the spot the drum and the songs were behind him, and he was so frightened that he hurried back to the trail and rode all the way to Hemptown as hard as he could to tell the story. He was a truthful man and they believed him.
A long time ago a man got lost in the mountains near the head of Oconaluftee river, and it was very cold and his friends thought that he must be frozen to death, but he was taken to a cave by the Nunnehi and given something to eat, and when the weather was more pleasant they conducted him to the main trail and sent him on home to the neighbors in the valley below.