"He is made of the same miserly grizzle as she," he retorted hotly. Again the outrush of the tide drowned their words.
Julie clenched her red fists and drew a long breath. A sudden frenzy seized her. Before she realized what she was doing, she had crawled in the mud on her hands and knees to the heavy picket. Here she waited until the backward rush again slackened the chain, then she half drew the iron pin that held the last link. Half drew it! Had the girl been alone, she told herself, she would have given her to the ebb tide.
Julie rose to her feet and turned back across the marsh, unconscious that the last link was nearly free and that the jerk and pull of the outgoing tide was little by little freeing the pin from the link.
She kept on her way, towards a hidden wood road that led down to the marsh at the far end of Pont du Sable and beyond.
She was done with the locality forever. Garron's money was still in her breast.
At the first glimmer of dawn the next morning, the short, solitary figure of a man prowled the beach. He was hatless and insane with rage. In one hand he gripped an empty sock. He would halt now and then and wave his long, ape-like arms—cursing the deep strip of sea water that prevented him from crossing to the hard desert of sand beyond—far out upon which lay an upturned gabion. Within this locked and stranded box lay two dead bodies. Crabs fought their way eagerly through the cracks of the water-sprung door, and over it, breasting the salt breeze, slowly circled a cormorant—curious and amazed at so strange a thing at low tide.
