It's quite
two months since I tasted child-flesh."
Ignoring the chaffing nature of the last remark Van Cheele tried to
draw the boy on the subject of possible poaching operations.
"You're talking rather through your hat when you speak of feeding on
hares." (Considering the nature of the boy's toilet the simile was
hardly an apt one.) "Our hillside hares aren't easily caught."
"At night I hunt on four feet," was the somewhat cryptic response.
"I suppose you mean that you hunt with a dog?" hazarded Van Cheele.
The boy rolled slowly over on to his back, and laughed a weird low
laugh, that was pleasantly like a chuckle and disagreeably like a
snarl.
"I don't fancy any dog would be very anxious for my company,
especially at night."
Van Cheele began to feel that there was something positively uncanny
about the strange-eyed, strange-tongued youngster.
"I can't have you staying in these woods," he declared
authoritatively.
"I fancy you'd rather have me here than in your house," said the
boy.
The prospect of this wild, nude animal in Van Cheele's primly
ordered house was certainly an alarming one.
"If you don't go. I shall have to make you," said Van Cheele.
The boy turned like a flash, plunged into the pool, and in a moment
had flung his wet and glistening body half-way up the bank where Van
Cheele was standing. In an otter the movement would not have been
remarkable; in a boy Van Cheele found it sufficiently startling.
His foot slipped as he made an involuntarily backward movement, and
he found himself almost prostrate on the slippery weed-grown bank,
with those tigerish yellow eyes not very far from his own.
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