If La Poche is a place to be shunned by day—at night it becomes terrible; it seems to breathe the hidden viciousness of its past, as if its ruins were the tombs of its bygone criminals.
I kept on the road, passed another carcass and drew abreast of a third, which I stepped out of the road to examine. Both its floors had long before I was born dropped into its cellar; its threshold beneath my feet was slippery with green slime; I looked up through its ribs, from which hung festoons of cobwebs and dead vines, like shreds of dried flesh hanging from a skeleton.
Still pursuing my way, I came across an old well; the bucket was drawn up and its chain wet; it was the first sign of habitation I had come across. As my hand touched the windlass, I instinctively gave it a turn; it creaked dismally and a dog barked savagely at the sound from somewhere up the hillside; then the sharp, snappy yelping of other dogs higher up followed.
I stopped, felt in my pockets and slipped two shells into my gun, heavily loaded for duck, with the feeling that if I were forced to shoot I would hold high over their heads. As I closed the breech of my gun and clicked back my hammers to be ready for any emergency, the tall figure of a man loomed up in the grassy road ahead of me, his legs in a ray of moonlight, the rest of him in shadow.
"Does this road lead out to the main road?" I called to him, not being any too sure that it did.
"Who is there?" he demanded sharply and in perfect French; then he advanced and I saw that the heavy stick he carried with a firm grip was mounted in silver.
"A hunter, monsieur," I returned pleasantly, noticing now his dress and bearing.
It was so dark where we stood, that I could not yet distinguish his features.
"May I ask you, monsieur, whom I have the pleasure of meeting," I ventured, my mind now more at rest.
He strode toward me.