, he was surprised to find no sign of it. Dismounting from his
saddle, he was thinking of lying up for the night (rather than
overshoot the mark) when a distant spark, for the fraction of a
second, caught his eye. Jumping into the saddle again, he rode towards
the place where the spark had flickered its brief moment, and there he
found a sentry smoking a pipe. The red glow of the baccy in the bowl
had guided B.-P. with his despatches safely to camp.

But not always does Baden-Powell see what he says he sees. On one
occasion in Kashmir he was matching his eyes against a shikari, and
the story of the contest is related by B.-P. in his _Aids to Scouting_
(published by Gale and Polden, London and Aldershot): "He pointed out
a hillside some distance off, and asked me if I could see how many
cattle there were grazing on it. It was only with difficulty that I
could see any cattle at all, but presently I capped him by asking him
if he could see the man in charge of the cattle. Now, I could not
actually see this myself, but knowing that there must be a man with
the herd, and that he would probably be up-hill above them somewhere,
and as there was a solitary tree above them (and it was a hot, sunny
day), I guessed he would be under this tree." And when the incredulous
shikari looked through the field-glasses he marvelled at the vision of
the white man--the herdsman was under the tree as happy as a hen in a
dust-bath. The uses of inductive reasoning!

A good instance of Baden-Powell's skill in "piecing things together"
is given in the same excellent manual on scouting. He was scouting one
day on an open grass plain in Matabeleland accompanied by a single
native. "Suddenly," he says, "we noticed the grass had been recently
trodden down; following up the track for a short distance, it got on
to a patch of sandy ground, and we then saw that it was the spoor of
several women and boys walking towards some hills about five miles
distant, where we believed the enemy to be hiding. Then we saw a leaf
lying about ten yards off the track--there were no trees for miles,
but there were, we knew, trees of this kind at a village 15 miles
distant, in the direction from which the tracks led. Probably, then,
these women had come from that village, bringing the leaf with them,
and had gone to the hills. On picking up the leaf, it was damp and
smelled of native beer. So we guessed that according to the custom of
these people they had been carrying p