Page:Scouting for girls, adapted from Girl guiding.djvu/85

Rh for signs and tracks is that from these you can read a meaning. It is exactly like reading a book. You will see the different letters, each letter combining to make a word, and the words then make sense; and there are also commas and full-stops and colons; all of these alter the meaning of the sense. They are all little signs which one who is practised and has learnt reading makes into sense at once, whereas a savage who has never learned could make no sense of it at all. And so it is with tracking.

Reading Signs.—As you know a soldier Scout in war can only get his information about the enemy by watching for the smallest signs both on the ground and in the far distance. In the war of Texas against Mexico in the last century, it was very important that the general commanding the Mexican Army should be captured when the defeat of that army was accomplished by the Texans. He had disappeared; but some of the Scouts of the Texan force were out scouting for the enemy when they saw in the distance some deer were suddenly startled by something they could not see and ran away. The Texan Scouts were at once suspicious, and went to the spot as fast as they could. There they found a soldier of the Mexicans evidently trying to escape. When they caught him and opened his tunic they found underneath he was wearing a silk shirt, which was not usual with a private in the Army. They took him to Headquarters, and there found that he was the Commander-in-Chief of the Mexican Army, trying to escape disguised as a soldier. And had it not been that they had noticed the deer being