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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."
It was on her initiative that a memorial brass was put up in the parish church to "Gabriel-Ernest, an unknown boy, who bravely sacrificed his life for another." Van Cheele gave way to his aunt in most things, but he flatly refused to subscribe to the Gabriel-Ernest memorial. The little stone Saint occupied a retired niche in a side aisle of the old cathedral.
"One would think you had seen a wolf." Van Cheele, who was not familiar with the old saying, thought the remark rather foolish; if he HAD seen a wolf on his property his tongue would have been extraordinarily busy with the subject.
He doesn't know who he is or where he comes from," explained Van Cheele desperately, glancing apprehensively at the waif's face to see whether he was going to add inconvenient candour to his other savage propensities. Miss Van Cheele was enormously interested. "Perhaps his underlinen is marked," she suggested.
"You're talking rather through your hat when you speak of feeding on hares." "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.
"We must call him something till we know who he really is," she said. "Gabriel-Ernest, I think; those are nice suitable names." Van Cheele agreed, but he privately doubted whether they were being grafted on to a nice suitable child.
When the bluebells began to show themselves in flower he made a point of informing every one of the fact; the season of the year might have warned his hearers of the likelihood of such an occurrence, but at least they felt that he was being absolutely frank with them. What Van Cheele saw on this particular afternoon was, however, something far removed from his ordinary range of experience.
Van Cheele and some workmen who were near by at the time testified to having heard a child scream loudly just near the spot where the clothes were found. Mrs. Toop, who had eleven other children, was decently resigned to her bereavement, but Miss Van Cheele sincerely mourned her lost foundling.
And then, as Van Cheele ran his mind over the various depredations that had been committed during the last month or two, he came suddenly to a dead stop, alike in his walk and his speculations.
"My mother died of some brain trouble," he explained, "so you will understand why I am averse to dwelling on anything of an impossibly fantastic nature that I may see or think that I have seen." "But what DID you see?" persisted Van Cheele. "What I thought I saw was something so extraordinary that no really sane man could dignify it with the credit of having actually happened.
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