“Well, would you believe it, the old thing was a cripple. You can see he only had three paws. The aft fore paw is gone. Like as not it was bitten off in some fight he had long ago.”
“You’re wrong!” cried Giraffe, who had leaned forward to examine the injury at closer quarters. “That ain’t any old hurt. The blood is as fresh as any of the rest, and I guess it only happened yesterday.”
“Fine. Go on,” declared Thad, and the tall scout, spurred on by that word of commendation, to exert himself to the utmost, was quick to continue.
“I can see that the paw wasn’t bitten off, nor yet shot away,” he remarked. “The cut is as clean as a whistle, and I reckon only a sharp hunting knife would do the job like that.”
“But what would Bumpus want to go and hack a paw off the old cat for?” objected Step Hen.
“Why, for a trophy, silly,” answered the’ other, quickly. “He just didn’t know how to skin the beast, and hardly liked the job of toting it all around with him. So you see, to convince the rest of us that he’d really and truly knocked over a wildcat, he just took that paw along. How’s that, Mr. Scoutmaster?”
“You hit the nail on the head that time, Giraffe,” answered Thad, pleased at the way the other had figured things out, for it proved that, once aroused to do his best, the tall scout possessed the ability required for reading “signs.”
And this was one of the things that Thad Brewster, as acting head of the troop, always tried to impress upon the minds of the scouts under him. “Let every tub stand on its own bottom.” “Learn to depend on yourself; do your own thinking; keep on the watch, and see all the wonderful things that are constantly happening around you in the great storehouse of Nature.” “Be awake, active”—in a word, as the manual of the organization has it, “be prepared.”
Giraffe and Step Hen had been tremendously staggered by the knowledge that the stout comrade, whom they always looked down on as a weakling, and called their “tenderfoot pard” with such a tone of patronage, seemed to be actually waking up, and doing things.
It was not enough that he exhibit the nerve to want to go out in search of a bear, all by himself. There was that episode of the muck bed for example—that sent Bumpus’ stock up a few points above par. It revealed the fact that in an emergency the fat boy could actually think for himself.