.
His name was Labouise, but he was called Chicot, and was in partnership
with Maillochon, commonly called Mailloche, to practice the doubtful and
undefined profession of junk-gatherers along the shore.

They were a low order of sailors and they navigated regularly only in the
months of famine. The rest of the time they acted as junk-gatherers.
Rowing about on the river day and night, watching for any prey, dead or
alive, poachers on the water and nocturnal hunters, sometimes ambushing
venison in the Saint-Germain forests, sometimes looking for drowned
people and searching their clothes, picking up floating rags and empty
bottles; thus did Labouise and Maillochon live easily.

At times they would set out on foot about noon and stroll along straight
ahead. They would dine in some inn on the shore and leave again side by
side. They would remain away for a couple of days; then one morning they
would be seen rowing about in the tub which they called their boat.

At Joinville or at Nogent some boatman would be looking for his boat,
which had disappeared one night, probably stolen, while twenty or thirty
miles from there, on the Oise, some shopkeeper would be rubbing his
hands, congratulating himself on the bargain he had made when he bought a
boat the day before for fifty francs, which two men offered him as they
were passing.

Maillochon reappeared with his gun wrapped up in rags. He was a man of
forty or fifty, tall and thin, with the restless eye of people who are
worried by legitimate troubles and of hunted animals. His open shirt
showed his hairy chest, but he seemed never to have had any more hair on
his face than a short brush of a mustache and a few stiff hairs under his
lower lip. He was bald around the temples. When he took off the dirty cap
that he wore his scalp seemed to be covered with a fluffy down, like the
body of a plucked chicken.

Chicot, on the contrary, was red, fat, short and hairy. He looked like a
raw beefsteak. He continually kept his left eye closed, as if he were
aiming at something or at somebody, and when people jokingly cried to
him, "Open your eye, Labouise!" he would answer quietly: "Never fear,
sister, I open it when there's cause to."

He had a habit of calling every one "sister," even his scavenger
companion.

He took up the oars again, and once more the boat disappeared in the
heavy mist, which was now turned snowy white in the pink-tinted sky.

"What kind of lead did you take, M