tskirts of the timber, and, beginning at the spot where the trail
entered it, proceeded, with the assistance of the Indian, to encircle
the wood, carefully examining every foot of the ground as they went, in
the hope that, if Butler and his party had passed through the timber and
emerged on its other side, the Indian would succeed in picking up the
spoor. But the hope was vain, for the wood was completely encircled--
the task occupying the entire day--without the discovery of the faintest
trace or sign of the passage of the missing party, which was not at all
surprising, for when the far side of the wood was reached the soil
proved to be of so stony a character, thickly interspersed with great
outcrops of rock, that even the most skilled and keen-eyed of trackers
might have been excused for failing in the search for footprints on so
unyielding a surface. It was a little puzzling to Harry that not even
the horse had left any trace behind him; but this was accounted for
when, upon rejoining the party who had been detailed to search the
interior of the wood, it was discovered that the animal had been found
by them, still saddled and bridled, wandering aimlessly about in search
of such scanty herbage as the soil there afforded. Upon the horse being
brought to him, the young Englishman--mindful of the scarcely concealed
hatred which Butler had, almost wantonly, as it seemed, aroused in the
breasts of the peons--immediately subjected the animal and his trappings
to a most rigorous examination in search of any sign of possible
violence, but nothing of the kind could be found, and the only result of
the examination was the conclusion, to which everything pointed, that
Butler had, for some reason, voluntarily dismounted and at least
temporarily abandoned the animal.

Butler and his party had now been missing for full twenty-four hours,
and Harry speedily arrived at two conclusions which inexorably led him
to a third. The first conclusion at which he arrived was that the peons
who had accompanied his chief, accustomed as they had been from their
earliest childhood to make their way about the country, were so little
likely to have lost their way that that theory might be unhesitatingly
abandoned; the second was that Butler would certainly not have absented
himself purposely from the camp for a whole night and a day, and that
therefore--this was the third conclusion--something had gone very
seriously wrong. The next problem tha