"Like a flash," said Sure Pop, "I bounded to the baby's side and snatched the bottle away. I tell you, I did some earnest thinking as I left that house. I realized that it would never do to ask that mother to join our army of Safety Scouts, for until she herself had formed the Safety habit, she could hardly be expected to teach Safety to others. The adventure of the baby and the poison bottle had opened my eyes to the real meaning of the King's words about finding Scouts who could read the little signs that spell DANGER.
"By the way, I told the poison bottle story to a great doctor the other day, and now he's doing his best to get a law passed requiring that all poison bottles be of some special shape, different from any other bottles. That will make them much safer, even in the dark."
"But how can they be made different in shape?" asked Betty. "What shape, Sure Pop?"
"Three-cornered, probably. That certainly would be a life-saving law, if he could only get it passed. Just think! There were several thousand deaths in the United States last year from that one cause alone—just from mistaking bottles of poison for other medicine."
"But what I can't see," said Bob, "is how anybody could mistake a poison bottle. They all have skulls and crossbones on them, haven't they?"
"Stop and think a moment," said the Safety Scout. "Suppose baby has croup in the night, and mother is roused out of a sound sleep and rushes to the medicine chest; she's only half awake—the light is dim—poor baby is gasping and choking—not a moment to lose. She isn't likely to stop and read labels very carefully, is she? But if she felt her hand close over a three-cornered bottle, it would wake her up in a hurry. Even in the darkness and in the excitement—if she had been trained to think of a three-cornered bottle as meaning DANGER, perhaps death—it would stay her hand as surely as a red light stops an engine."
"I suppose," said Betty, "that when folks are badly hurt, or awfully, awfully sick, other folks lose their heads and don't know what they really are doing."
"Betty, you've hit the nail right on the head. Now that's why we must fix things so safety won't depend on level heads or time to think. The danger signal must pop right into our heads from force of habit. The sooner American boys and girls—yes, and the grown-ups, too—get the Safety habit, the sooner 'Safety First' will change from phrase into fact.
"The first day I ever spent in America opened my eyes to the price your country is paying for the word 'guess.' The more I studied the situation, the oftener I noticed folks saying 'I guess' where they should have said 'I know.' In nearly all of America's accidents, guesswork is the real cause.
"The moment I realized that, I said to myself, 'It's high time America dropped guesswork out of its daily life.' My work was cut out for me: I began right then and there to study out ways of getting folks to stop guessing, once for all, and be sure—sure pop!"