“He was a good-sized fellow, for you can see that the track of his bare foot is really tremendous; and if you look here you’ll notice where he lay flat on his face, so that it is possible to roughly measure his length—all of six feet, too. And his left hand is lacking one finger!” added the scoutmaster.
“What’s that?” gasped Step Hen. “You’re only joshing us now, Thad; for how under the sun could you tell such a thing as that?”
Allan chuckled, and looked immensely pleased.
“I thought so!” he was heard to mutter to himself.
“Well, it’s the old story of keeping your eyes about you,” remarked Thad, “and using your head as you go. Three separate times, now, I saw where he had placed his left hand spread out on the ground where it was soft enough to take a pretty good impression; and in every instance the third finger was missing; so with all that proof I thought I was safe in assuming that this man was marked. And let me say, that later on when we get the chance I mean to ask a lot of questions just to satisfy myself about it. If a convict escaped from jail, or some camp, who has no third finger on his left hand I’ll consider that I’ve proved my case.”
Some of the boys were still a little skeptical, and asked to be shown those wonderful imprints of the hand that told Thad such an interesting story; but after they too had examined them they admitted that it was even so.
“It sure beats the Dutch how these things stick up with some fellows,” Bumpus frankly admitted, as he scratched his frowsy head in wonder, and almost awe. “Now, the rest of us looked right at them impressions in the mud. We saw they’d been made by a human hand, of course, cause there ain’t any monkeys around here besides Davy; but not one of us went any deeper. Why, after you’ve been shown, it stands out there like a mountain, and you see it as plain as you see your nose when you shut one eye. I wisht I could discover things that way; there’d be heaps of things I’d find out, let me tell you.”
“Yes,” said Giraffe, severely, as he moved away from the vicinity of Bumpus, his nose elevated at an angle of forty-five degrees; “but what we’re all hoping most for now is that you’ll hurry and get over that cold in your head, so that your natural sense of smell will come back; for then you’d certain sure duck out of that grimy old suit that’s just greased from top to bottom, and give us a chance to breathe the pure air.”
Bumpus looked at him pityingly.
“You do love to carry on a joke to the limit, Giraffe,” he said, simply.