From the first it had seemed clear that nothing in the way of communicating with authorities, experts, could be done until their father was there to back them, adding his own testimony. It was no good just writing—Hector did, indeed, begin a letter to Sir Ray Lankester, but tore it up, appalled by his own formless, boyish handwriting. “He’d think we were just getting at him—a couple of silly kids,” was his reflection.
He knew a lot for his age; was very certain of his own knowledge; felt no personal fear of this wild man of his. But ordinary grown-up people! That was altogether a different matter. And here he touched the primitive mistrust of all real youth for anything too completely finished and sophisticated.
Of course, from the very beginning, there were all sorts of minor troubles with Matty over their continued thefts of food; difficulties in keeping the creature away from the house and village.
But all that was nothing to what followed.
The first dim, unformulated sense of fear began on the night when Hector, awakened by a loud rustling among the leaves of that one tree, discovered Hodge there, climbing along a bough which ended close against Rhoda’s window.
Rhoda’s, not his—that was the queer part of it!
The boy felt half huffed as he drove him off. But when he came again, some instinct, something far less plain than thought, began to worry him: something which seemed ludicrous, until it gathered and grew to a feeling of nausea so horrible that the cold sweat pricked out upon his breast and forehead.
At the third visit the fear was more defined. But still.... That brute “smitten” with Rhoda! He tried to laugh it off. Anyhow, what did it matter? And yet.... Hang it all! there was something sickening about it all. It was impossible to sleep at night, listening, always listening.
He was only thirteen. Of course he had heard other chaps talking, but he had no real idea of the fierce drive of physical desire. And yet it was plain enough that here was something “beastly” beyond all words.
He told Rhoda to keep her window bolted, and when she protested against such “fugging,” touched on his own fears, tried, awkwardly enough, to explain without explaining.