“No, Mass’ George, nowhere.”
“Then some one must have come and stolen it while we were eating.”
“How people come ’teal a gun wif Pomp and Mass’ George eatin’ um breakfast here?”
“I don’t know. Come and look for footsteps.”
“Did; and de ’gator not been.”
“No, but perhaps a man has.”
“Man? No man lib here.”
“Let’s look,” I whispered—“look for men’s footsteps.”
The boy glanced at me wonderingly for a moment or two, then nodded his head and began to search.
Where we stood by the bush, saving that the ground had been trampled by my feet, the task would have been easy enough, for everything showed in the soft dry sand; but the bush was at the edge where the sand began running from the foot of the bluff to the river, and everywhere on the other side was dense growth; patches of shrubs, grass, dry reed and rush, where hundreds of feet might have passed, and, save to the carefully-trained eye of an Indian, nothing would have been seen.