"Eat! Shoot!" laughed Nort. "No, I tell you it's to listen to
your heart beats, or lungs. Binaural means, simply, that it's
fixed so you can listen with both ears at the same time. And
stethoscope comes from two Greek words, stethos, the breast, and
skopen, to view. It means, literally, to view inside the chest,
but of course the doctors who use the stethoscope don't really do
that. They only listen through the ear pieces--these," and he
held up the two rubber tubes ending in hard nipples, pierced with
small holes.

"What's the other end for!" asked Bud, indicating the shiny disk
of metal that dangled from the single tube.

"That's the part the doctor holds on your chest or over your
heart," Dick answered. "Sometimes the doctor puts it to your back
to listen to your breathing from that side."

"Well, who in the world would have a--a binaural stethoscope out
here!" asked Bud. "Yon reckon Doc. Tunison dropped it!" he went
on, referring to the local veterinarian. "Shucks no! Cow doctors
don't use 'em, not that I ever heard of," declared Nort. "Though
Doc. Tunison is up to date."

"He sure was in discovering that it was germs which caused the
epidemic outbreak in our stock last year," remarked Bud.

"Yes, we got out of that mighty lucky," chimed in Dick. "What's
become of Pocut Pete?" he asked, referring to a scoundrel of a
cowboy.