Going back on such a journey is the woefulest experience, but retrace our steps we must.  Perhaps the pocket-book lay in the road not half a mile back.  But not in half a mile, or a mile, was it found.  Probably, then, the man on the sorrel horse had picked it up.  But who was the man on the sorrel horse, and where had he gone?  Probably the coat worked loose in crossing Toe River and the pocket-book had gone down-stream.  The number of probabilities was infinite, and each more plausible than the others as it occurred to us.  We inquired at every house we had passed on the way, we questioned every one we met.  At length it began to seem improbable that any one would remember if he had picked up a pocketbook that morning.  This is just the sort of thing that slips an untrained memory.

At a post office or doctor’s shop, or inn for drovers, it might be either or neither, where several horses were tied to the fence, and a group of men were tilted back in cane chairs on the veranda, we unfolded our misfortune and made particular inquiries for a man on a sorrel horse.  Yes, such a man, David Thomas by name, had just ridden towards Bakersville.  If he had found the pocket-book, we would recover it.  He was an honest man.  It might, however, fall into hands that would freeze to it.

Upon consultation, it was the general verdict that there were men in the county who would keep it if they had picked it up.  But the assembly manifested the liveliest interest in the incident.  One suggested Toe River.  Another thought it risky to drop a purse on any road.  But there was a chorus of desire expressed that we should find it, and in this anxiety was exhibited a decided sensitiveness about the honor of Mitchell County.  It seemed too bad that a stranger should go away with the impression that it was not safe to leave money anywhere in it.  We felt very much obliged for this genuine sympathy, and we told them that if a pocket-book were lost in this way on a Connecticut road, there would be felt no neighborhood responsibility for it, and that nobody would take any interest in the incident except the man who lost, and the man who found.

By the time the travelers pulled up at a store in Bakersville they had lost all expectation of recovering the missing article, and were discussing the investment of more money in an advertisement in the weekly newspaper of the capital.  The Professor, whose reform sentiments agreed with those of the newspaper, advised it.  There was a group of idlers, mica acquaintances of the morning, and philosophers in front of the store, and the Friend opened the colloquy by asking if a man named David Thomas had been seen in town.  He was in town, had ridden in within an hour, and his brother, who was in the group, would go in search of him.  The information was then given of the loss, and that the rider had met David Thomas just before it was discovered, on the mountain beyond the Toe.  The news made a sensation, and by the time David Thomas appeared a crowd of a hundred had drawn around the horsemen eager for further developments.  Mr. Thomas was the least excited of the group as he took his position on the sidewalk, conscious of the dignity of the occasion and that he was about to begin a duel in which both reputation and profit were concerned.  He recollected meeting the travelers in the morning.