proofs, and then, the brigadier, who had been
listening very attentively while he emptied his glass and filled it
again, with an indifferent air, turned to his gendarme and said:

"We must go and look in the cottage of Severin's wife." At which the
gendarme smiled and nodded three times.

Then Madame Lecacheur came to them, and very quietly, with all a
peasant's cunning, questioned the brigadier in her turn. That shepherd
Severin, a simpleton, a sort of a brute who had been brought up and
grown up among his bleating flocks, and who knew scarcely anything
besides them in the world, had nevertheless preserved the peasant's
instinct for saving, at the bottom of his heart. For years and years he
must have hidden in hollow trees and crevices in the rocks, all that he
earned, either as shepherd, or by curing animal's sprains (for the
bone-setter's secret had been handed down to him by the old shepherd
whose place he took), by touch or word, and one day he bought a small
property consisting of a cottage and a field, for three thousand francs.

A few months later, it became known that he was going to marry a servant,
notorious for her bad morals, the innkeeper's servant. The young fellows
said that the girl, knowing that he was pretty well off, had been to his
cottage every night, and had taken him, overcome him, led him on to
matrimony, little by little, night by night.

And then, having been to the mayor's office and to church, she now lived
in the house which her man had bought, while he continued to tend his
flocks, day and night, on the plains.

And the brigadier added:

"Polyte has been sleeping with her for three weeks, for the thief has no
place of his own to go to!"

The gendarme make a little joke:

"He takes the shepherd's blankets."

Madame Lecacheur, who was seized by a fresh access of rage, of rage
increased by a married woman's anger against debauchery, exclaimed:

"It is she, I am sure. Go there. Ah! the blackguard thieves!"

But the brigadier was quite unmoved.

"A minute," he said. "Let us wait until twelve o'clock, as he goes and
dines there every day. I shall catch them with it under their noses."

The gendarme smiled, pleased at his chief's idea, and Lecacheur also
smiled now, for the affair of the shepherd struck him as very funny:
deceived husbands are always amusing.

* * * * *

Twelve o'clock had just struck when the brigadier, followed by his man,
knocked