ain which hung over the river, a flatboat, manned
by two men, pushed up on the grass.

The one who was rowing rose and took a pailful of fish from the bottom
of the boat, then he threw the dripping net over his shoulder. His
companion, who had not made a motion, exclaimed: "Say, Mailloche, get
your gun and see if we can't land some rabbit along the shore."

The other one answered: "All right. I'll be with you in a minute." Then
he disappeared, in order to hide their catch.

The man who had stayed in the boat slowly filled his pipe and lighted
it. His name was Labouise, but he was called Chicot, and was in
partnership with Maillochon, commonly called Mailloche, to practice the
doubtful and undefined profession of junk-gatherers along the shore.

They were a low order of sailors and they navigated regularly only in
the months of famine. The rest of the time they acted as junk-gatherers.
Rowing about on the river day and night, watching for any prey, dead or
alive, poachers on the water and nocturnal hunters, sometimes ambushing
venison in the Saint-Germain forests, sometimes looking for drowned
people and searching their clothes, picking up floating rags and empty
bottles; thus did Labouise and Maillochon live easily.

At times they would set out on foot about noon and stroll along straight
ahead. They would dine in some inn on the shore and leave again side by
side. They would remain away for a couple of days; then one morning they
would be seen rowing about in the tub which they called their boat.

At Joinville or at Nogent some boatman would be looking for his boat,
which had disappeared one night, probably stolen, while twenty or thirty
miles from there, on the Oise, some shopkeeper would be rubbing his
hands, congratulating himself on the bargain he had made when he bought
a boat the day before for fifty francs, which two men offered him as
they were passing.

Maillochon reappeared with his gun wrapped up in rags. He was a man of
forty or fifty, tall and thin, with the restless eye of people who are
worried by legitimate troubles and of hunted animals. His open shirt
showed his hairy chest, but he seemed never to have had any more hair
on his face than a short brush of a mustache and a few stiff hairs under
his lower lip. He was bald around the temples. When he took off the
dirty cap that he wore his scalp seemed to be covered with a fluffy
down, like the body of a plucked chicken.

Chicot, on the contrary, w