they were safe and his mate still asleep,
he replaced the plank over his fortune--crossed the dirt floor to his
barrier of a door, dropped an iron rod through two heavy staples,
securely bolting it--blew out the tallow dip thrust in the neck of an
empty bottle, and went to bed.

Months passed--months that were bleak and wintry enough on the marsh for
even a hare to take to the timber for comfort. During most of that
winter Garron peddled the skins of rabbits he snared on the marsh, and
traded and bought their pelts, and he lived poor that no one might
suspect his wealth. He and his mate rose, like the wild fowl, with the
sun and went to bed with it, to save the light of the tallow dip. Though
I have said she could easily have strangled him with her hands, she
refrained. Twice, when she lay half awake she had seen him run his wiry
arm in the wall--one night she had heard the lifting of the heavy plank
and the faint crinkling sound of the package as he gripped it. She had
long before this suspected he had money hidden.

Julie was no fool!

With the spring the marsh became more tenable. The smallest song birds
from the woods flitted along the ditches; there were days, too, when the
desolate prairie became soft--hazy--and inviting.

At daybreak, the beginning of one of these delicious spring days,
Garron, hearing a sharp cry without, rose abruptly and unbolted his
barrier. He would have stepped out and across his threshold had not his
bare foot touched something heavy and soft. He looked down--still half
asleep--then he started back in a sort of dull amazement. The thing his
foot had touched was a bundle--a rolled and well-wrapped blanket, tied
with a stout string. The sharp cry he had heard he now realized, issued
from the folds of the blanket. Garron bent over it, his thumb and
forefinger uncovering the face of a baby.

"_Sacristi!_" he stammered--then leaned back heavily against the old
rudder of a door. Julie heard and crawled out of bed. She was peering
over his shoulder at the bundle at his feet before he knew it.

Garron half wheeled and faced her as her breath touched his coarse ear.

"_Eh bien!_ what is it?" he exclaimed, searching vainly for something
else to say.

"_Eh ben! Ca! Nom de Dieu!_" returned his mate nodding to the bundle.
"It is pretty--that!"

"_Tu m'accuses, hein?_" he snarled.

"They do not leave bundles of that kind at the wrong door," she retorted
in reply, half closing her blue eyes a