“What made it?” I whispered. For a minute it didn’t seem safe to speak out loud.
“I dunno,” says Mark, with his eyes big and his face serious. “Looks like a man if the toes weren’t on sideways.”
We called Plunk and Binney, but they couldn’t make anything out of it, so we built the fire good and big, just in case it was some kind of a wild animal. We knew animals were afraid of fire.
It was Binney who thought about the frying-pan. “It must be a man, or it wouldn’t have used the pan,” he says.
That was right. Animals don’t cook. Plunk drew a long breath. “Maybe it’s a wild man,” he said, trembly voiced.
“Like there was with that circus last summer,” I said, remembering the pictures in front of the tent of seven men catching a thing all hair and beard, with skins on it for clothes, and big teeth. We all got closer to the fire.
“Bosh!” snorts Mark; but his voice was a little dry, and he didn’t look any too comfortable. “There ain’t any wild men.” But he didn’t believe it and we didn’t believe it.
“What had we better do?” asks Binney.
“Nothing,” says Plunk, letting on he wasn’t afraid. “It won’t hurt anybody even if it is a wild man. And, besides, there are four of us.”
That wasn’t so very encouraging, judging from the size of the footprint. Anything with a foot as big as that could take four boys at a bite.