"That's the way to handle jaguars," he remarked. "He'll not come back. If you had shot him," he continued severely to Jud, who held his cocked revolver in one hand, "he would have killed the boy and both of us before he died himself." And the professor lay down again to resume his interrupted slumbers.
It was this occurrence which started a discussion the next morning in regard to weapons, offensive and defensive.
"I 'low," said Hen Pine, making his heavy machete swing through the air as he whirled it around his head, "that I can stop anything I meet with this 'ere toothpick of mine."
"Hen," remarked Jud, impressively, "do you see that round thing hangin' against the sky in the big tree about fifty yards away?"
"Yassah, yassah," responded Hen, "that's a monkey-pot full of Brazil-nuts."
"Well, boy," returned the old trapper, "just keep your eye on it."
As he spoke he raised his automatic to the level of his hip, shooting without sighting, with that strange sixth sense of position which some of the great revolver-shots of a past generation used to acquire. There was a flash, a sharp spat, and the case of nuts about twice the size of a man's fist came whizzing to the ground. Hen stared at the old trapper with his mouth open.
"You is sure the hittenest shooter ever I see," he said at last.
Joe said nothing, but, drawing from his belt the keen little hatchet which he always carried, poised himself with his left foot forward, and, whirling the little weapon over his head, sent it hurtling through the air toward the same Brazil-nut tree. The little ax buzzed like a bee and, describing a high curve, buried itself clear to the head in the soft bark. Picking up a couple of heavy round stones, Will put himself into a pitching position and sent one whizzing in a low straight peg which hardly rose at all and which struck the tree close to Joe's hatchet with a smack which would have meant a broken bone for any man or beast that it struck; for, as Joe had found out when the two were pursued by Scar Dawson's gang, Will was a natural-born stone-thrower, with deadly speed and accuracy.
It was Professor Ditson, however, who gave what was perhaps the most spectacular exhibition of all. Standing before them, lean and gaunt, he suddenly reached to his belt and drew out a keen, bone-handled, double-edged sheath-knife. Poising this flat on the palm of his hand, he threw it, with a quick jerk, with much the same motion of a cricket-bowler. The keen weapon hissed through the air like an arrow, and was found sunk nearly to the hilt in the bark between the mark of Will's stone and the head of Joe's hatchet.