rmined,
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 cure 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 mod