“Yes?” Harry said. “Break it to us gently.”
The kid said, “Well, if that man wasn’t thrown down and didn’t fall down, then how did he get down? He couldn’t have come across far over toward the east there, because when I had the fire going, I could see it was all marshy.”
“Well then, he came down by the trail,” Harry said.
“All right, show me a footprint in this trail,” Pee-wee shot right back at him.
Harry looked and I looked, and even little Skinny got down on his knees and looked, and there wasn’t the sign of a footprint in that trail. It was soft there, too, and if there had been any footprints they would have shown good and clear.
“Maybe he came in an airplane,” Skinny piped up.
“I guess if there was an airplane anywhere around here, we’d have found it before this,” I said.
Harry said, “Well, I suppose it’s possible that somebody picked his way down the same as Roy did and then maybe stumbled. None of us know where those rocks are, but they did look pretty far out from above, and it does seem mighty funny that there aren’t any footprints in this trail. Anyway, we’ll push ahead and see what we see.”
We went along the trail single file, Pee-wee going first, because if any one can follow a trail, he can. All the while we kept holding our torches down, looking for footprints, but there wasn’t a sign of any. Then all of a sudden he stopped short, saying kind of scared sort of, “There it is! Look—straight ahead—I can see it.”
About fifty feet ahead of us that trail ran between two big rocks, only they were farther apart and looked different than they did from up on the cliff. And right there in the trail between them lay a man with a soldier’s uniform on. He was lying face down, and we knew he must be dead, because his arms were spread out and one of his legs was lying up over a corner of rock, kind of crazy like. No matter how badly injured a man may be, even if he’s unconscious, he never lies sprawling like that. There’s kind of a way that a dead person lies.