Accordingly, they proceeded to the melancholy task with great readiness and intelligence.
Abner and Enoch agreed in their accounts as to the position in which they had found the body.

It was seated nearly upright, the back supported by a mass of matted brush, and one hand still grasping a broken twig of the alders.

It was most probably owing to the former circumstance that the body had escaped the rapacity of the carrion birds, which had been seen hovering above the thicket, and the latter proved that life had not yet entirely abandoned the hapless victim when he entered the brake.

The opinion now became general, that the youth had received his death-wound in the open prairie, and had dragged his enfeebled form into the cover of the thicket for the purpose of concealment.

A trail through the bushes confirmed this opinion.