But our hero’s success had come to an end with the finding of the envelope to be delivered at Orella; and although he searched around for a quarter of an hour longer, nothing of any value came to sight. Then, with a deep sigh, he pulled himself up once more to the trail, and set off on a hunt for his horse.
“Jasniff was headed in the opposite direction, and maybe he didn’t go after Sport,” Dave argued to himself. “Anyhow, I’ve got to go that way, even if I have to journey on foot.”
Painfully our hero limped along, for the climbing up and down on the rocks had done the lame ankle no good. He had had to loosen his shoe, for the ankle had swollen not a little.
“If I could only bathe it it wouldn’t be so bad,” he thought.
But there was no water at hand, and the small quantity he carried in a flask for drinking purposes was too precious to be used on the injured limb.
He had covered several yards when his lame ankle gave him such a twinge that he had to sit down to give it a rest.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do if I can’t find that horse,” he thought bitterly.
He was sitting and nursing the hurt ankle and looking over the landscape in the valley below him, when something on one of the bushes less than fifty feet away caught his eye.
“I wonder what that can be,” he mused. “It doesn’t look like a bird’s nest. It looks more like an old shoe. I wonder——Can it be my pocketbook?”
The last thought was so electrifying that Dave leaped to his feet, and, regardless of the painful ankle, walked over to the edge of the trail. Here he could see the object quite plainly, and he lost no time in crawling down to the bushes and obtaining it.