Far away, a little side-wheel steamer was laboring along over the strait from the blue island of Jersey, rising and dipping half out of sight, with a trail of intermittent puffs of dense black smoke.
"There is the enemy's stronghold, and now for Jack Blunt's plan of campaign! I wonder if he'll come over to-day, or to-morrow?
He must have had my telegram last night!" Alan Hawke amused himself with the bold, black-eyed French girl's vicious stories of olden deeds done there in Etienne Garcin's gloomy spider's den.

He even laughed when the red-bodiced she-devil laughingly pointed down at the loosened floor-planks in the back room, underneath which mantrap the swish of the throbbing waves could be heard.
Then the sheeted, cold driving rain hid the promontory, with its heavy, lumpy-looking fort, the old gray granite parish church, and the clustered ships of the harbor, now dashing about and tugging wildly at their doubled moorings, soon to be left high and dry on the soft ooze when the thirty-foot tide receded.

"There's where we find our best customers," laughed the French wanton, as Alan Hawke drew her to his knee, and they laughed merrily over the golden harvest of the sea, the price of the recovered dead.

Through the narrow stone fanged streets lumbered along the heavy French hooded carts, driven by squatty men in oil skins and sou'westers, and laden down with the spoils of the whale, cod, and oyster fisheries.

Stout women in huge blue aprons, with baskets on their rounded arms, gossiped at the protecting corners, while the shouts of Landlord Etienne Garcin's drunken band of sea wolves now began to ring out in the smoky salle a boire.
It was two o'clock when the burly form of Etienne Garcin was propelled unceremoniously into Alan Hawke's room.