He marks then the bearing that was given him, by scraping into the ground with a metal edge of a piece of his armor. They can triangulate; or they can try again closer to the given direction with another Xill, to get a clearer direction and a shorter distance.
But first, Esta will look around that rough area, fucking harder this time, with Detect Magic and not just Locate Object, in case he is somehow looking for something that is not his Bag at all. For the volume that they had thoroughly scoured with Locate Object, they had not rechecked all that intensively with Detect Magic.
In retrospect, there is a different way that people have, of looking through a place where something might be, and looking harder through a place they have reason to believe contains the fucking prize.