After half an hour I said what I had been pondering ever since we started.
“Billy, this is a crazy business. I’m willing to call the bet off if you are.”
But he answered gravely.
“I’m sorry, my friend, but I’m not going to lose the opportunity of making a fiver.”
Then there was silence again until Anderson looked back from the wheel and said:
“Look here, Billy, let’s stop at this pub and then go home. I can lend you a fiver or more if you want it. You needn’t pay me until you want to.”
But Billy was resolute¹:
“No, Dick, I owe enough already. I should like to earn an honest meal for once.”
So Anderson drove on and soon we came into sight of the grim place which Craine had chosen for our experiment. I saw that Billy was beginning to lose his nerve for he was shivering in his big overcoat and his feet were very still, pressed down with all his might.
“Billy,” I said, “I don’t think we need go any further; we should only be wasting time. You’ve obviously won the bet.”
And I think he would have yielded—for he was rather a child—when Craine’s voice answered for him.
“What damned nonsense. The thing isn’t begun yet. Donne’s bet that he has the nerve to go through the whole werewolf ceremony. Just getting to the place is nothing. He doesn’t yet know what he has to do. I’ve got as far as this twice before—once in Nigeria with a man of forty, but he hadn’t the nerve to go through with it, and once in Wales with the bravest thing in the world, a devoted² woman; but she couldn’t do it. Donne may, because he’s young and hasn’t seen enough to make him easily frightened.”
But Billy was frightened, badly, and so were Anderson and I and for this reason we let ourselves be overborne by Craine because he knew that we were; and he smiled triumphant³ as a stage Satan in the moonlight.
It was strange being beaten like this by Craine who in College was always regarded as a rather unsavoury joke. But then this whole expedition was strange and Craine was an old man—thirty-three—an age incalculable to the inexperience of twenty-one; and Billy was only just nineteen.
We had started off merrily enough down St. Aldate’s; Billy had said:
“I wonder what human flesh tastes like; what d’you suppose one should drink with it?” and when I had answered with utter futility⁴, “Spirits, of course,” they had all laughed; which shows that we were in high good humour.

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