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