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 dete