Once the Gratcher saw you with its right eye the crutches swung toward you and you were caught: it picked you up and began to look you all over, with the eyes in the ends of its fingers.

This tickled you so that you went crazy in a minute.
Nancy feared the Gratcher, and she became supremely lovely to the little boy when she permitted him to guard her from it, instead of running home across the lawn when it was surely coming;--a loveliness he felt more poignantly at certain reflective times when he was not also afraid.

For, the Gratcher being his own invention, these moments of superiority to its terrors would inevitably seize him.
[Illustration: "She could be made to believe that only he could protect her from the Gratcher."] Better than protecting Nancy did he love to report the Gratcher's immediate presence to Allan, daring him to stay on that spot until it put its dreadful head around the corner and shook one of its crutches at them.
In low throbbing tones he would report its fearful approach, stride by stride, on the crutches.

This he could do by means of the Gratcher-eye, with which he claimed to be endowed.

One having a Gratcher-eye can see around any corner when a Gratcher happens to be coming--yet only then, not at any other time, as Allan had proved by experiment on the first disclosure of this phenomenon.