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. Almost instinctively he half raised his
hand to his throat. They boy laughed again, a laugh in which the snarl
had nearly driven out the chuckle, and then, with another of his
astonishing lightning movements, plunged out of view into a yielding
tangle of weed and fern.

"What an extraordinary wild animal!" said Van Cheele as he picked himself
up. And then he recalled Cunningham's remark "There is a wild beast in
your woods."

Walking slowly homeward, Van Cheele began to turn over in his mind
various local occurrences which might be traceable to the existence of
this astonishing young savage.

Something had been thinning the game in the woods lately, poultry had
been missing from the farms, hares were growing unaccountably scarcer,
and complaints had reached him of lambs being carried off bodily from the
hills. Was it possible that this wild boy was really hunting the
countryside in company with some clever poacher dogs? He had spoken of
hunting "four-footed" by night, but then, again, he had hinted strangely
at no dog caring to come near him, "especially at night." It was
certainly puzzling. And then, as Van Cheele ran his mind over the
variou