mp find um foots and de mark of de tail."

He looked sharply round, so did I; but as he searched the sand I
examined the bushes, feeling that I must be mistaken, and that I must
have laid the gun somewhere else.

It was very stupid, but I knew people did make such mistakes sometimes;
and quite convinced now that this was a lapse of memory, began to cudgel
my brains to try and recall the last thing I had done with the gun.

Pomp settled that, for he came back to me suddenly, and said--

"See Mass' George put de gun dah!"

"You are sure, Pomp?" I said, as he stood pointing his black finger at
the bush.

"Yes, Pomp ebber so sure."

"Did you find any alligator marks?"

"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.

Certainly nothing was visible to me, but the fact that it was quite
possible for a man to have crawled from the forest, keeping the patches
of shrubby growth between him and us, till he reached the bushes,
through which he could have cautiously stolen, and passing a hand over
softly, lifted the gun and its pouches from where I had stood them, and
then stolen away as he had come.

One thing was evident, we had an enemy not far away; and, unarmed as we
were, saving that we had our knives, the sooner we took flight the
better.

All this was plain to me, but as I gazed in Pomp's face I found it was
not so clear to him; there was a strange look in his eyes, his skin did
not seem so black as usual, and he was certainly trembling.

"Why, Pomp," I said, "don't look like that." For though I felt a little