“At her, Flanbard! At her, Garou!”
And the two dogs sprang at the wretched woman, and
one seized her by the throat, while the other caught
her by the side.
When the brigadier came back, she was dying on the
ground in a pool of blood, and “the man with
the dogs” said with a laugh: “There,
you see, that is the way I break in my dogs!”
The custom-house officer rushed out in horror, followed
by his hounds who licked his hands as they ran, and
made them quite red.
The next morning “the man with the dogs”
was found still bound, but chuckling, in his hovel
that was turned into a slaughter-house.
They were both arrested and tried, when “the
man with the dogs” was acquitted, and the brigadier
sentenced to a term of imprisonment. The matter
gave much food for talk in the district, and is, indeed,
still talked about, for “the man with the dogs”
returned there, and is more celebrated than ever under
his nickname, but his celebrity is not of a bad kind,
for he is now just as much respected and liked as he
was despised and hated formerly. He is still,
as a matter of fact, “the man with the dogs,”
as he is rightly called, for he has not his equal as
a dog-breaker for leagues around, but now he no longer
breaks in mastiffs, as he has given up teaching honest
dogs to “act the part of Judas,” as he
says, for those dirty custom-house officers, and now
he only devotes himself to dogs to be used for smuggling,
and he is worth listening to when he says:
“You may depend upon it, that I know how to
punish such commodities as she was, where they have
sinned!”
The hawkers’ cottage stood at the end of the
Esplanade, on the little promontory where the jetty
is, where all the winds, all the rain, and all the
spray met. The hut, both walls and roof, was built
of old planks, more or less covered with tar, whose
chinks were stopped with oakum, and dry wreckage was
heaped up against it. In the middle of the room
an iron pot stood on two bricks, and served as a stove,
when they had any coal, but as there was no chimney,
it filled the room, which was ventilated only by a
low door, with smoke, and there the whole crew lived,
eighteen men and one woman. Some had undergone
various terms of imprisonment, and nobody knew what
the others were, but though they were all, more or
less, suffering from some physical defect and were
nearly old men, they were still all strong enough
for hauling. For the “Chamber of Commerce”
tolerated them there, and allowed them that hovel to
live in, on condition that they should be ready to
haul, by day and by night.
For every vessel they hauled, each got a penny by
day and two-pence by night, but that was not certain,
on account of the competition of retired sailors,
fishermen’s wives, laborers who had nothing to
do, but who were all stronger than those half-starved
wretches in the hut.
