He has travelled through Europe, knows the Gold Coast Hinterland as well as any European, and has almost as good a notion as the Great Powers themselves concerning their frontier defences.
This reminds me that Baden-Powell sometimes spends his holidays in visiting historical battlefields and travelling through various countries to see how their defences and their guns are getting along.
He is an excellent linguist, and can make his way in any country without arousing suspicions.

During some military manoeuvres one autumn (we need not enter into special details) Baden-Powell was wandering at the back of the troops, seeing things not intended for the accredited representatives of Great Britain, who had the front row of the stalls, and saw beautifully what they were meant to see.

What he noted on this occasion is regarded by military authorities as very valuable information.
But exciting as these adventures are, they possess no such fascination for Baden-Powell as the life in breeches, gaiters, flannel-shirt, and cowboy's hat--when the mountains infested with murderous natives are blurred by the night, and he is free to steal in among their shadows at his will, and creep noiselessly through the enemy's lines.

The Matabele, of whom we shall speak later on, soon got to distinguish Baden-Powell from the rest of Sir Frederick Carrington's troops in 1896.

They christened him "Impessa" then, and to this day he is spoken of by the Kaffirs with awe and admiration as the "Wolf that never Sleeps." Silent in his movements, with eyes that can detect and distinguish suspicious objects where the ordinary man sees nothing at all, with ears as quick as a hare's to catch the swish of grass or the cracking of a twig, he goes alone in and out of the mountains where the savages who have marked him down are asleep by the side of their assegais, or repeating stories of the dreadful Wolf over their bivouac fires.