The Savage Gentleman by Philip Wylie

"That's not a man?"

    "No, Jack. Not a man."

    "Dawgone. That's what I saw the first night we was here. And now I recollect what was funny about that there man. He had a tail."

    The minds of McCobb and Stone harked back through time to the first hours of their arrival and they remembered Jack's "man." They exchange glances. Here was at last the final lifting of the long unspoken thought that perhaps somewhere in the secret places of the island a breed of men lived furtively. They turned over the dead animal and looked at Jack and smiled.

    But Henry had received two new ideas, born of the stress of the hurricane. He was scarcely interested in the lemur. He spoke of his ideas when his father came to his bedside before he had fallen asleep.

    Henry's blue eyes were wide and intent in the gloom.

    "Father!"

    "Yes, son."

    "Isn't this home?"

    "Yes, son. It's all the home we have." His silhouette, tall and supple, bent over the bed.

    "Then why did Jack say he wished he was home?"

    "Oh--did he say that?"

    "In the lightning."

    ' I'll explain all about it tomorrow, son. It's part of your geography lesson."

    "Oh."

    "Go to sleep."

    "Father!"

    Patiently now, "Yes, son?"

    "What are girls?"

    A long pause. A pause so long that it marked the mind of the child.

    "Girls?"

    "Boys and girls. I'm a little boy. What's a girl? Are they little, too?"

    Stone realized that they had grown away entirely even from the mention of women. His silence had been the result of his life. But the silence of McCobb and Jack was doubtless in deference to him.

    "Girls are part of another lesson, son. I'll tell you about them."

    "Now?"

    "Not now. Go to sleep."

    "'Night."

    "Good night."

    Chapter Six: THE MENACE

    THE years on the island passed with unbelievable speed, from the standpoint of retrospect. They mingled and telescoped in a memory of similar days and regular changes of the two seasons. Little things made separate days stand out. They recalled events, but they confused dates.

    A day when Henry was observed by his father floating in his boat on the pond-still harbor and looking intently overboard. His father stood on the beach and watched.
    He wondered what the boy was seeing.

    And then, suddenly, the water near the boat broke and there emerged a long and terrible arm, a sinuous arm, covered with saucer-shaped suckers and feeling in the unfamiliar air. Henry regarded the arm with interest but his father paled.:· .

    "Row, son, row! Come ashore!!"

    "There's an odd thing down here in the water--"

    "I know. Hurry--it's a devilfish."

    Henry rowed in obediently although reluctantly and his sweating father saw that the monster followed him nearly to the water's edge.

    Was Henry nine, then, or ten?

    How old was he when they began to talk in French and German instead of English? Eight for French? Seven?

    It was on his twelfth birthday that he showed his father the chalice he had carved from wood and covered with gold leaf. Its shape was handsome, but the horses he had engraved upon it were faintly like the pictures of horses but woefully unlike horses in the flesh.

    It was on his twelfth birthday that Stone discussed him with McCobb.

    Faithful McCobb. He had passed fifty. His eyes were still clear and his muscles firm--but his hair was salted with gray.

    "What do you think of the lad, McCobb?"

    "He's a grand lad."

    "And what are his faults?"

    "None," the Scotchman said loyally.

    "And what characteristics might become fault in him?"

    McCobb drew on his pipe.

    "That's different. He's independent and fearless. He's idealistic. You can have ideals here in this wilderness but the world would shock them rudely. He's willful and stubborn."

    "That's true."

    "And I've never seen a lad who had no contact with the lassies. It makes them strange. He's manly enough and he's polite. He'd make friends swiftly in any city--but he's strange. There's a look in his eye--an absent look--that's going to increase, Stephen, when he passes fourteen