When I awoke, I felt chilly, and to my astonishment I perceived that our fire was down.  I rose and looked immediately for the prisoners.  The two that we had put within our circle were still snoring heavily, but the others, whose feet we had not bound on account of their painful bruises, were gone.  I looked for the watch, and found that it was one of the lawyers, who, having drank too freely of the whisky, had fallen asleep.  The thieves had left the blanket; I touched it; I perceived that it was yet warm, so that I knew they could not have been gone a long while.

The day was just breaking, and I awoke my companions, the lawyer was much ashamed of himself, and offered the humblest apologies, and as a proof of his repentance, he poured on the ground the remainder of the liquor in his flask.  As soon as Gabriel and Roche were up, we searched in the grass for the foot-prints, which we were not long in finding, and which conducted us straight to the place where we had left our horses loose and grazing.  Then, for the first time, we perceived that the horses which were shod, and which belonged to the three lawyers, had had their shoes taken off, when in possession of the thieves the day before.

By the foot-prints, multiplied in every direction, it was evident that the fugitives had attempted, though in vain, to seize upon some of our horses.  Following the foot-marks a little farther, brought us to a small sandy creek, where the track was lost; and on the other side, to our great astonishment, we saw plainly (at least the appearance seemed to imply as much), that help had been at hand, and that the thieves had escaped upon a tall American horse, ambling so lightly, that the four shoes of the animal were comparatively but feebly marked on the ground.  It seemed, also, that the left foreleg of the animal had been at some time hurt, for the stopping was not regular, being sometimes longer, sometimes shorter, and now and then deviating two or three inches from the line.

I thought immediately that we had been discovered by another roving party of the brigands, and that they had gone to get a reinforcement to overpower us, but upon a closer examination of the track, I came at once to the solution of the mystery.  I remarked that on the print left by the shoes, the places upon which the head of the nails should have pressed deeper, were, on the contrary, convex, the shoes were, therefore, not fixed by nails; and my suspicions being awakened, I soon spied upon a soft sandy spot, through which the track passed, that there was something trailing from the left hind foot, and I satisfied myself that this last slight mark was made by a piece of twine.  A little afterwards I remarked that on the softer parts of the ground, and two or three inches behind and before the horse-shoe prints, were two circular impressions, which I ascertained to be the heel and the toe-marks left by a man’s mocassins.