When Mr.Walker returned the little boy belonging to the establishment came back with him.

He had seen Mr.
Elliott start and assured me that he had heard him express his determination of keeping the bed of the river for eighteen miles.

With this piece of information we moved on down the river on the tracks which we were able to distinguish for about two miles and a half, when they quitted it in a south-south-west direction; and from the hard nature of the ground the tracking from thence became excessively difficult.

If the colt had traversed this route, its little foot had made no impression on the soil; and when we got on the ironstone hills, we altogether lost the traces of the horse.

Both the native and myself imagined, from our seeing no tracks of the colt, from the indistinctness of those of the horse, and from the circumstance of the boy's telling us that Mr.Elliott intended to proceed eighteen miles down the river, that we had followed the wrong marks; just therefore as night began to fall I moved back to the river.
January 18.
We started at dawn, following down the river, but could see nothing of Mr.Elliott's tracks: and our evening journey was equally unsuccessful.