We've had a drowning at Pont du Sable. Drownings are not infrequent on this rough Norman coast of France. Only last December five able fishermen went down within plain sight of the dunes in a roaring white sea that gave no quarter. This gale by night became a cyclone; the sea a driving hell of water, hail and screaming wind. The barometer dropped to twenty-eight. The wind blew at one hundred and twenty kilometers an hour. Six fishing boats hailing from Boulogne perished with their crews. Their women went by train to Calais, still hoping for news, and returned weeping and alone.

At Boulogne the waves burst in spray to a height of forty feet over the breakwater—small wonder that the transatlantic liner due there to take on passengers, signalled to her plunging tender already in danger—"Going through—No passengers—" and proceeded on her way to New York.

The sea that night killed with a blow.

This latest drowning at Pont du Sable was a tragedy—or rather, the culmination of a series of tragedies.

"Suicide?"

"Non—mon ami—wait until you hear the whole truth of this plain tale."

On my return from shooting this morning, Suzette brought me the news. The whole fishing village has known it since daylight.

It seems that the miser, Garron—Garron's boy—Garron's woman, Julie, and another woman who nobody seems to know much about, are mixed up in the affair.

Garron's history I have known for months—my good friend the curÉ confided to me much concerning the unsavory career of this vagabond of a miser, whose hut is on the "Great Marsh," back of Pont du Sable. Garron and I hailed "bonjour" to each other through the mist at dawn one morning, as I chanced to pass by his abode, a wary flight of vignon having led me a fruitless chase after them across the great marsh. At a distance through the rifts of mist I mistook this isolated hut of Garron's for a gabion. As I drew within hailing distance of its owner I saw that the hut stood on a point of mud and wire grass that formed the forks of the stream that snakes its way through the centre of this isolated prairie, and so on out to the open sea, two kilometers beyond.

As shrewd a rascal as Garron needed just such a place to settle on. As he returned my bonjour, his woman, Julie, appeared in the low doorway of the hut and grinned a greeting to me across the fork of the stream. She impressed me as being young, though she was well on in the untold forties. Her mass of fair hair—her ruddy cheeks—her blue eyes and her thick strong body, gave her the appearance of youthful buxomness.

Life must be tough enough with a man like Garron. With the sagacity of an animal he knew the safety of the open places. By day no one could emerge from the far horizon of low woodland skirting the great marsh, without its sole inhabitant noting his approach. By night none but as clever a poacher as Garron could have found his way across the labyrinth of bogs, ditches and pitfalls. Both the hut and the woman cost Garron nothing; both were a question of abandoned wreckage.

Garron showed me his hut that morning, inviting me to cross a muddy plank as slippery as glass, with which he had spanned the stream, that he might get a closer look at me and know what manner of man I was. He did not introduce me to the woman, and I took good care, as I crossed his threshold and entered the dark living-room with its dirt floor, not to force her acquaintance, but instead, ran my eye discreetly over the objects in the gloom—a greasy table littered with dirty dishes, a bed hidden under a worn quilt and a fireplace of stones over which an iron pot of soup was simmering. Beyond was another apartment, darker than the one in which I stood—a sort of catch-all for the refuse of the former.

The whole of this disreputable shack was built of the wreckage of honest ships. It might have been torn down and reassembled into some sort of a decent craft. Part of a stout rudder with its heavy iron hinges, served as the door. For years it had guided some good ship safe into port—then the wreck occurred. For weeks after—months, perhaps—it had drifted at sea until it found a resting place on the beach and was stolen by Garron to serve him as a strong barrier.

Garron had a bad record—you saw this in his small shifty black eyes, that evaded your own when you spoke to him, and were riveted upon you the moment your back was turned. He was older than the woman—possibly fifty years of age, when I first met him, and, though he lived in the open, there was a ghastly pallor in his hard face with its determined, square jaw—a visage well seamed by sin—and crowned by a shock of black hair streaked with gray. In body he was short, with unusually broad shoulders and unnaturally long arms. Physically he was as strong as an ape, yet I believe the woman could easily have strangled him with her bare hands. Garron had been a hard drinker in his youth, a capable thief and a skilful poacher. His career in civilization ended when he was young and—it is said—good-looking.

Some twenty-five years ago—so the curÉ tells me—Garron worked one summer for a rich cattle dealer named Villette, on his farm some sixty kilometers back of the great marsh. Villette was one of those big, silent Normans, who spoke only when it was worth while, and was known for his brusqueness and his honesty. He was a giant in build—a man whose big hands and feet moved slowly but surely; a man who avoided making intimate friendships and was both proud and rich—proud of his goods and chattels—of his vast grazing lands and his livestock—proud too, of his big stone farmhouse with its ancient courtyard flanked by his stone barns and his entrance gate whose walls were as thick as those of some feudal stronghold; proud, too, of his wife—a plump little woman with a merry eye and whom he never suspected of being madly infatuated with his young farm hand, Garron.

Their love affair culminated in an open scandal. The woman lacked both the shrewdness and discretion of her lover; he had poached for years and had never been caught;—it is, therefore, safe to say he would as skilfully have managed to evade suspicion as far as the woman was concerned, had not things gone from bad to worse.

Villette discovered this too late; Garron had suddenly disappeared, leaving madame to weather the scandal and the divorce that followed. More than this, young Garron took with him ten thousand francs belonging to the woman, who had been fool enough to lend him her heart—a sum out of her personal fortune which, for reasons of her own, she deemed it wisest not to mention.

With ten thousand francs in bank notes next his skin, Garron took the shortest cut out of the neighbourhood. He travelled by night and slept by day, keeping to the unfrequented wood roads and trails secreted between the thick hedges, hidden by-ways that had proved their value during the guerilla warfares that were so successfully waged in Normandy generations ago. Three days later Garron passed through the modest village of Hirondelette, an unknown vagabond. He looked so poor that a priest in passing gave him ten sous.

"Courage, my son," counselled the good man—"you will get work soon. Try the farm below, they are in need of hands."

"May you never be in want, father," Garron strangled out huskily in reply. Then he slunk on to the next farm and begged his dinner. The bank notes no longer crinkled when he walked; they had taken the contour of his hairy chest. Every now and then he stopped and clutched them to see if they were safe, and twice he counted and recounted them in a ditch.

With the Great Marsh as a safe refuge in his crafty mind, he passed by the next sundown back of Pont du Sable; slept again in a hedge, and by dawn had reached the marsh. Most of that day he wandered over it looking for a site for his hut. He chose the point at the forks of the stream—no one in those days, save a lone hunter ever came there. Moreover, there was another safeguard. The Great Marsh was too cut up by ditches and bogs to graze cattle on, hence no one to tend them, and the more complete the isolation of its sole inhabitant.

Having decided on the point, he set about immediately to build his hut. The sooner housed the better, thought Garron, besides, the packet next his chest needed a safe hiding place.

For days the curlews, circling high above the marsh, watched him snaking driftwood from the beach up the crooked stream to the point at the forks. The rope he dragged them with he stole from a fisherman's boat picketed for the night beyond the dunes. When he had gathered a sufficient amount of timber he went into Pont du Sable with three hares he had snared and traded them for a few bare necessities—an old saw, a rusty hammer and some new nails. He worked steadily. By the end of a fortnight he had finished the hut. When it was done he fashioned (for he possessed considerable skill as a carpenter) a clever hiding place in the double wall of oak for his treasure. Then he nailed up his door and went in search of a mate.

He found her after dark—this girl to his liking—at the fÊte in the neighbouring village of Avelot. She turned and leered at him as he nudged her elbow, the lights from the merry-go-round she stood watching illumining her wealth of fair hair and her strong young figure silhouetted against the glare. Garron had studied her shrewdly, singling her out in the group of village girls laughing with their sweethearts. The girl he nudged he saw did not belong to the village—moreover, she was barefooted, mischievously drunk, and flushed with riding on the wooden horses. She was barely eighteen. She laughed outright as he gripped her strong arm, and opened her wanton mouth wide, showing her even, white teeth. In return for her welcome he slapped her strong waist soundly.

"Allons-y—what do you say to a glass, ma belle?" ventured Garron with a grin.

"Eh ben! I don't say no," she laughed again, in reply.

He felt her turn instinctively toward him—there was already something in common between these two. He pushed her ahead of him through the group with a certain familiar authority. When they were free of the crowd and away from the lights his arm went about her sturdy neck and he crushed her warm mouth to his own.

"Allons-y—" he repeated—"Come and have a glass."

They had crossed in the mud to a dingy tent lighted by a lantern; here they seated themselves on a rough bench at a board table, his arm still around her. She turned to leer at him now, half closing her clear blue eyes. When he had swallowed his first thimbleful of applejack he spat, and wiped his mouth with the back of his free hand, while the girl grew garrulous under the warmth of the liquor and his rough affection. Again she gave him her lips between two wet oaths. No one paid any attention to them—it was what a fÊte was made for. For a while they left their glasses and danced with the rest to the strident music of the merry-go-round organ.

It was long after midnight when Garron paid his score under the tent. She had told him much in the meantime—there was no one to care whom she followed. She told him, too, she had come to the fÊte from a hamlet called Les ForÊts, where she had been washing for a woman. The moon was up when they took the highroad together, following it until it reached the beginning of Pont du Sable, then Garron led the way abruptly to the right up a tangled lane that ran to an old woodroad that he used to gain the Great Marsh. They went lurching along together in comparative silence, the man steadying the girl through the dark places where the trees shut out the moon. Garron knew the road as well as his pocket—it was a favourite with him when he did not wish to be seen. Now and then the girl sang in a maudlin way:

It was gray dawn when they reached the edge of the Great Marsh that lay smothered under a blanket of chill mist.

"It is over there, my nest," muttered Garron, with a jerk of his thumb indicating the direction in which his hut lay. Again he drew her roughly to him.

"Dis donc, toi!" he demanded brusquely: "how do they call you?" It had not, until then, occurred to him to ask her name.

"Eh ben—Julie," she replied. "It's a sacrÉ little name I never liked. Eh, tu sais," she added slowly—"when I don't like a thing—" she drew back a little and gazed at him sullenly—"Eh ben—I am like that when I don't like a thing." Her flash of temper pleased him—he had had enough of the trustful kitten of Villette's.

"Come along," said he gruffly.

"Dis donc, toi," she returned without moving. "It is well understood then about my dress and the shoes?"

"Mais oui! Bon Dieu!" replied the peasant irritably. He was hungry and wanted his soup. He swore at the chill as he led the way across the marsh while she followed in his tracks, satisfied with his promise of the dress and shoes. She wanted a blue dress and she had seen the shoes that pleased her some months before in the grocery at Pont du Sable when a dog and she had dragged a fisherwoman in her cart for their board and lodging.

By the time they reached the forks of the stream the rising sun had melted the blanket of the mist until it lay over the desolate prairie in thin rifts of rose vapour.

It was thus the miser, Garron, found his mate.

Julie proved to be a fair cook, and the two lived together, at the beginning, in comparative peace. Although it was not until days after the fÊte at Avelot that she managed to hold him to his promise about the blue dress, he sent her to Pont du Sable for her shoes the day after their arrival on the marsh—she bought them and they hurt her. The outcome of this was their first quarrel.

"SacrÉ bon Dieu!" he snarled—"thou art never content!" Then he struck her with the back of his clenched fist and, womanlike, she went whimpering to bed. Neither he nor she thought much of the blow. Her mind was on the shoes that did not fit.

When she was well asleep and snoring, he ran his sinewy arm in the hole he had made in the double wall—lifted the end of a short, heavy plank, caught it back against a nail and gripped the packet of bank notes that lay snug beneath it. Satisfied they were safe and his mate still asleep, he replaced the plank over his fortune—crossed the dirt floor to his barrier of a door, dropped an iron rod through two heavy staples, securely bolting it—blew out the tallow dip thrust in the neck of an empty bottle, and went to bed.

Months passed—months that were bleak and wintry enough on the marsh for even a hare to take to the timber for comfort. During most of that winter Garron peddled the skins of rabbits he snared on the marsh, and traded and bought their pelts, and he lived poor that no one might suspect his wealth. He and his mate rose, like the wild fowl, with the sun and went to bed with it, to save the light of the tallow dip. Though I have said she could easily have strangled him with her hands, she refrained. Twice, when she lay half awake she had seen him run his wiry arm in the wall—one night she had heard the lifting of the heavy plank and the faint crinkling sound of the package as he gripped it. She had long before this suspected he had money hidden.

Julie was no fool!

With the spring the marsh became more tenable. The smallest song birds from the woods flitted along the ditches; there were days, too, when the desolate prairie became soft—hazy—and inviting.

At daybreak, the beginning of one of these delicious spring days, Garron, hearing a sharp cry without, rose abruptly and unbolted his barrier. He would have stepped out and across his threshold had not his bare foot touched something heavy and soft. He looked down—still half asleep—then he started back in a sort of dull amazement. The thing his foot had touched was a bundle—a rolled and well-wrapped blanket, tied with a stout string. The sharp cry he had heard he now realized, issued from the folds of the blanket. Garron bent over it, his thumb and forefinger uncovering the face of a baby.

"Sacristi!" he stammered—then leaned back heavily against the old rudder of a door. Julie heard and crawled out of bed. She was peering over his shoulder at the bundle at his feet before he knew it.

Garron half wheeled and faced her as her breath touched his coarse ear.

"Eh bien! what is it?" he exclaimed, searching vainly for something else to say.

"Eh ben! Ça! Nom de Dieu!" returned his mate nodding to the bundle. "It is pretty—that!"

"Tu m'accuses, hein?" he snarled.

"They do not leave bundles of that kind at the wrong door," she retorted in reply, half closing her blue eyes and her red hands.

"Allons! allons!" he exclaimed with heat, still at a loss for his words.

With her woman's instinct she brushed past him and started to pick up the bundle, but he was too quick for her and drew her roughly back, gripping her waist so sharply that he felt her wince.

"It does not pass like that!" he cried sharply. "Eh ben! listen to me. I'm too old a rat to be made a fool of—to be tricked like that!"

"Tricked!" she laughed back—"No, my old one—it is as simple as bonjour, and since it is thine thou wilt keep it. Thou'lt—keep what thou—"

The pent-up rage within him leaped to his throat:

"It does not pass like that!" he roared. With his clenched fist he struck her squarely across the mouth. He saw her sink limp to the ground, bleeding, her head buried between her knees. Then he picked up the child and started with it across the plank that spanned the fork of the stream. A moment later, still dizzy from the blow, she saw him dimly, making rapidly across the marsh toward a bend in the stream. Then the love of a mother welled up within her and she got to her feet and followed him.

"Stay where thou art!" he shouted back threateningly.

The child in his arms was screaming. She saw his hand cover its throat—the next moment she had reached him and her two hands were about his own in a grip that sent him choking to his knees. The child rolled from his arms still screaming, and the woman who was strangling Garron into obedience now sank her knee in his back until she felt him give up.

"Assez!" he grunted out when he could breathe.

"Eh ben! I am like that when I don't like a thing!" she cried, savagely repeating her old words. He looked up and saw a dangerous gleam in her eyes. "Ah, mais oui alors!" she shouted defiantly. "Since it is thine thou wilt keep it!"

Garron did not reply. She knew the fight was out of him and picked up the still screaming baby, which she hugged to her breast, crooning over it while Garron got lamely to his feet. Without another word she started back to the hut, Garron following his mate and his son in silence.

Years passed and the boy grew up on the marsh, tolerated by Garron and idolized and spoiled by Julie—years that transformed the black-eyed baby into a wiry, reckless young rascal of sixteen with all the vagabond nature of his father—straight and slim, with the clear-cut features of a gypsy. A year later the brother of Madame Villette, a well-known figure on the Paris Bourse, appeared and after a satisfactory arrangement with Garron, took the boy with him to Paris to be educated.

It was hard on Julie, who adored him. Her consent was not even asked, but at the time she consoled herself with the conviction, however, that the good fortune that had fallen to the lot of the baby she had saved, was for the best. The uncle was rich—that in itself appealed strongly to her peasant mind. That, and her secret knowledge of Garron's fortune, for she had discovered and counted it herself and, motherlike, told the boy.

In Paris the attempt to educate Jacques Baptiste Garron was an expensive experiment. When he went to bed at all it was only when the taverns and cafÉs along the "Boul-miche" closed before dawn. Even then he and his band of idle students found other retreats and more glasses in the all-night cafÉs near the Halles. And so he ate and drank and slept and made love to any little outcast who pleased him—one of these amiable petites femmes—the inside of whose pocketbook was well greased with rouge—became his devoted slave.

She was proud of this handsome devil-may-care "type" of hers and her jealousy was something to see to believe. Little by little she dominated him until he ran heavily in debt. She even managed the uncle when the nephew failed—she was a shrewd little brat—small and tense as wire, with big brown eyes and hair that was sometimes golden and sometimes a dry Titian red, according to her choice. Once, when she left him for two days, Garron threatened to kill himself.

"Pauvre gosse!" she said sympathizingly on her return—and embraced him back to sanity.

The real grain of saneness left in young Garron was his inborn love of a gun. It was the gun which brought him down from Paris, back to the Great Marsh now and then when the ducks were on flight.

He had his own gabion now at the lower end of the bay at Pont du Sable, in which he slept and shot from nights when the wind was northeast—a comfortable, floating box of a duck-blind sunk in an outer jacket of tarred planks and chained to a heavy picket driven in the mud and wire grass, for the current ran dangerously strong there when the tide was running out.

Late in October young Garron left Paris suddenly and the girl with the Titian hair was with him. He, like his father, needed a safe refuge. Pressed by his creditors he had forged his uncle's name. The only way out of the affair was to borrow from Julie to hush up the matter. It did not occur to him at the time how she would feel about the girl; neither did he realize that he had grown to be an arrogant young snob who now treated Julie, who had saved his life, and pampered him, more like a servant than a foster-mother.

The night young Garron arrived was at the moment of the highest tides. The four supped together that night in the hut—the father silent and sullen throughout the meal and Julie insanely jealous of the girl. Later old Garron went off across the marsh in the moonlight to look after his snares.

When the three were alone Julie turned to the boy. For some moments she regarded him shrewdly. She saw he was no longer the wild young savage she had brought up; there was a certain nervous, blasÉ feebleness about his movements as he sat uneasily in his chair, his hands thrust in the pockets of his hunting coat, his chin sunk on his chest. She noticed too, the unnatural redness of his lips and the haggard pallor about his thin, sunken cheeks.

"Eh ben, mon petit—" she began at length. "It is a poor place to get fat in, your Paris! They don't feed you any too well—hein?—Those grand restaurants you talk so much about. Pouf!"

"Penses-tu?" added the girl, since Garron did not reply. Instead he lighted a fresh cigarette, took two long puffs from it, and threw it on the floor.

The girl, angered at his silence and lack of courage, gave him a vicious glance.

"HÉlas!" sighed Julie, "you were quicker with your tongue when you were a baby."

"Ah zut!" exclaimed the girl in disgust. "He has something to tell you—" she blurted out to Julie.

"Eh ben! What?" demanded Julie firmly.

"I need some money," muttered the boy doggedly. "I need it!!" he cried suddenly, gaining courage in a sort of nervous hysteria.

Julie stared at him in amazement, the girl watching her like a lynx.

"Bon Dieu!" shouted Julie. "And it is because of that you sit there like a sick cat! Listen to me, my little one. Eat the good grease like the rest of us and be content if you keep out of jail."

The boy sank lower in his chair.

"It will be jail for me," he said, "unless you help me. Give me five hundred francs. I tell you I am in a bad fix. SacrÉ bon Dieu!—you shall give it to me!" he cried, half springing from his chair.

"Shut up, thou," whispered the girl—"not so fast!"

"Do you think it rains money here?" returned Julie, closing her red fists upon the table, "that all you have to do is to ask for it? Ah, mais non, alors!"

The boy slunk back in his chair staring at the tallow dip disconsolately. The girl gritted her small teeth—somehow, she felt abler than he to get it out of Julie in the end.

"You stole it, hein?" cried Julie, "like your father. Name of a dog! it is the same old trick that, and it brings no good. Allons!" she resumed after a short pause. "DÉpÊche toi! Get out for your ducks—I'm going to bed."

"Give me four hundred," pleaded the boy.

"Not a sou!" cried Julie, bringing her fist down on the greasy table, and she shot a jealous glance at the girl.

Without a word, young Garron rose dejectedly, got into his goatskin coat, picked up his gun and, turning, beckoned to the girl.

"Go on!" she cried; "I'll come later."

"He is an infant," said she to Julie, when young Garron had closed the door behind him. "He has no courage. You know the fix we are in—the Commissaire of Police in Paris already has word of it."

Julie did not reply; she still sat with her clenched fists outstretched on the table.

"He has forged his uncle's check," snapped the girl.

Julie did not reply.

"Ah, c'est comme Ça!" sneered the girl with a cool laugh—"and when he is in jail," she cried aloud, "Eh, bien—quoi?"

"He will not have you, then," returned Julie faintly.

"Ah——" she exclaimed. She slipped her tense little body into her thick automobile coat and with a contemptuous toss of her chin passed out into the night, leaving the door open.

"Jacques!" she called shrilly—"Jacques!—Attends."

"Bon!" came his voice faintly in reply from afar on the marsh.

After some moments Julie got slowly to her feet, crossed the dirt floor of the hut and closing the door dropped the bar through the staples. Then for the space of some minutes she stood by the table struggling with a jealous rage that made her strong knees tremble. She who had saved his life, who had loved him from babyhood—she told herself—and what had he done for her in return? The great Paris that she knew nothing of had stolen him; Paris had given him her—that little viper with her red mouth; Paris had ruined him—had turned him into a thief like his father. Silently she cursed his uncle. Then her rage reverted again to the girl. She thought too, of her own life with Garron—of all its miserly hardships. "They have given me nothing—" she sobbed aloud—"nothing."

"Five hundred francs would save him!" she told herself. She caught her breath, then little by little again the motherly warmth stole up into her breast deadening for the moment the pain of her jealousy. She straightened to her full height, squaring her broad shoulders like a man and stepped across to the wall.

"It is as much mine as it is his," she said between her teeth.

She ran her arm into the hole in the wall, lifted the heavy plank and drew out a knitted sock tied with a stout string. From the toe she drew out Garron's fortune.

"He shall have it—the gosse—" she said, "and the rest—is as much mine as it is his."

She thrust the package in her breast.

Half an hour later Julie stood, scarcely breathing, her ear to the locked door of his gabion.

"A pretty lot you came from," she overheard the girl say, "that old cat would sooner see you go to jail." The rest of her words were half lost in the rush and suck of the tide slipping out from the gabion's outer jacket of boards. The heavy chain clinked taut with the pull of the outgoing tide, then relaxed in the back rush of water.

"Bah!" she heard him reply, "they are pigs, those peasants. I was a fool to have gone to them for help."

"You had better have gone to the old man," taunted the girl, "as I told you at first."

"He is made of the same miserly grizzle as she," he retorted hotly. Again the outrush of the tide drowned their words.

Julie clenched her red fists and drew a long breath. A sudden frenzy seized her. Before she realized what she was doing, she had crawled in the mud on her hands and knees to the heavy picket. Here she waited until the backward rush again slackened the chain, then she half drew the iron pin that held the last link. Half drew it! Had the girl been alone, she told herself, she would have given her to the ebb tide.

Julie rose to her feet and turned back across the marsh, unconscious that the last link was nearly free and that the jerk and pull of the outgoing tide was little by little freeing the pin from the link.

She kept on her way, towards a hidden wood road that led down to the marsh at the far end of Pont du Sable and beyond.

She was done with the locality forever. Garron's money was still in her breast.

At the first glimmer of dawn the next morning, the short, solitary figure of a man prowled the beach. He was hatless and insane with rage. In one hand he gripped an empty sock. He would halt now and then and wave his long, ape-like arms—cursing the deep strip of sea water that prevented him from crossing to the hard desert of sand beyond—far out upon which lay an upturned gabion. Within this locked and stranded box lay two dead bodies. Crabs fought their way eagerly through the cracks of the water-sprung door, and over it, breasting the salt breeze, slowly circled a cormorant—curious and amazed at so strange a thing at low tide.