est
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 _fete_ 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 vil