r 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
cafes 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 cafes 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 refug