Immediately Bristles uttered a loud cry of astonishment, not unmixed with joy.
"You recognize the cap, then; do you?" asked Fred.
"Sure thing," answered Bristles, promptly. "It's Colon's cap."
CHAPTER IX
THE COVERED WAGON
"What makes you so sure it belonged to him?" Fred asked.
"Oh! I know it as well as I do my own cap," replied Bristles. "It's a queer mixture, you can see; and here's the place where Colon shot that arrow through it one day, when he asked me to throw it up in the air for him."
"And I ought to know it too, Fred," remarked the short legged cousin of the missing boy. "Because I bought it for Chris. You see, I lost his other for him, and I had to spend some of my hard-earned cash to get him a new one. I found that at Snyder's Emporium; and I thought he'd kick like fun because it was so odd; but say, he just thought it the best thing ever! That's Colon's headgear, all right."
"Then we'll consider that point settled," Fred went on to say. "The next thing on the program to decide is, how does it happen to be lying here in this ditch? As I remember it, there wasn't much of a wind last night when I went to bed, and it doesn't seem then that it could have blown off his head when he was running."