“Left leg, not much, but bleed heap,” and the Indian pointed to several other significant spots as he moved along the trail.
“Now how under the sun could he tell it was the left leg?” asked Step Hen, evidently deeply puzzled to account for the positive manner in which the guide made this assertion.
“Oh! that would be easy enough,” remarked the patrol leader. “Just stop, and you’ll remember that each foot makes a different track. This one is the left foot. And now you’ll be quick to think, even if you don’t say it, that perhaps that drop could have fallen from the right foot as it was raised, into the track of the left foot. Sebattis has other ways to prove what he says. Show them, chief, won’t you; because they want to learn all they can.”
“Huh! look this way, see how,” replied the dark-faced guide, leading the several eager scouts to where he knew an extra-plain print of the foot in question might be found.
Then he pointed out the difference between the mark of the right from the left foot, and showed them that there was a heavier trail where that same right shoe happened to be planted.
“You understand?” remarked Thad, who was following all this with considerable interest himself, for he, too, had more or less to learn.
“Seems to me he means that if a feller happened to get hurt, sudden like, in his left leg, he’d begin to limp,” Giraffe spoke up, eagerly.
“And when he limped,” Step Hen went on to add, “it stands to reason the print of the foot on the leg he wanted to favor wouldn’t be near so plain as the other. Why ain’t that the easiest thing you ever heard tell of?”
“Sure it is,” Davy Jones insinuated; “and after Columbus showed those Spanish grandees how to stand an egg up on end by punching the top down on the table, why, didn’t they think that was the silliest thing ever? Oh! it’s just as simple as turnin’ over your hand—after another feller has been and told you how.”
“All the same, it is easy,” Thad went on to say, “and next time, perhaps some of you will be able to figure things out yourselves. That’s what scouts ought to do every time. That’s the best part of the Boy Scout movement, General Baden-Powell says; it makes boys stop depending on other people, when they can just as well look out for themselves.”