"When you stole your geese, you did but take your brethren home! Englishmen are but men. Put the wine in their head, make them whirl in a waltz, promise them a kiss, and one turns such brains as they have inside out, as a piou-piou turns a dead soldier's wallet. When a woman is handsome, she is never denied. He shall tell me where he comes from. I doubt that it is from England! See here—why not! first, he never says God-damn; second, he don't eat his meat raw; third, he speaks very soft; fourth, he waltzes so light, so light! fifth, he never grumbles in his throat like an angry bear; sixth, there is no fog in him. How can he be English with all that?"

"There are English, and English," said the philosophic Tata, who piqued himself on being serenely cosmopolitan.

Cigarette blew a contemptuous puff of smoke.

"There was never one yet that did not growl! Pauvres diables! If they don't use their tusks, they sit and sulk!—an Englishman is always boxing or grumbling—the two make up his life."

Which view of Anglo-rabies she had derived from a profound study of various vaudevilles, in which the traditional God-damn was pre-eminent in his usual hues; and having delivered it, she sprang down from her wall, strapped on her little barrel, nodded to her gros bebees, where they lounged full-length in the shadow of the stone wall, and left them to resume their game at Boc, while she started on her way, as swift and as light as a chamois, singing, with gay, ringing emphasis that echoed all down the hot and silent air.

Hers was a dashing, dauntless, vivacious life, just in its youth, loving plunder, and mischief, and mirth; caring for nothing; and always ready with a laugh, a song, a slang repartee, or a shot from the dainty pistols thrust in her sash, that a general of division had given her, whichever best suited the moment. She had never shed tears in her life.

Her mother a camp-follower, her father nobody knew who, a spoiled child of the Army from her birth, with a heart as bronzed as her cheek; yet with odd, stray, nature-sown instincts here and there, of a devil-may-care nobility, and of a wild grace that nothing could kill—Cigarette was the pet of the Army of Africa, and was as lawless as most of her patrons.

She would eat a succulent duck, thinking it all the spicier because it had been a soldier's "loot"; she would wear the gold plunder off dead Arabs' dress, and never have a pang of conscience with it; she would dance all night long, when she had a chance, like a little Bacchante; she would shoot a man, if need be, with all the nonchalance in the world. She had had a thousand lovers, from handsome marquises of the Guides to tawny, black-browed scoundrels in the Zouaves, and she had never loved anything, except the roll of the pas de charge, and the sight of her own arch, defiant face, with its scarlet lips and its short jetty hair, when she saw it by chance in some burnished cuirass, that served her for a mirror. She was more like a handsome, saucy boy than anything else under the sun, and yet there was that in the pretty, impudent, little Friend of the Flag that was feminine with it all—generous and graceful amid all her boldness, and her license, her revelries, and the unsettled life she led in the barracks and the camps, under the shadow of the eagles.

Away she went down the crooked windings and over the ruined gardens of the old Moorish quarter of the Cashbah; the hilts of the tiny pistols glancing in the sun, and the fierce fire of the burning sunlight pouring down unheeded on the brave, bright hawk eyes that had never, since they first opened to the world, drooped or dimmed for the rays of the sun, or the gaze of a lover; for the menace of death, or the presence of war.

Of course, she was a little Amazon; of course, she was a little Guerrilla; of course, she did not know what a blush meant; of course, her thoughts were as slang and as riotous as her mutinous mischief was in its act; but she was "bon soldat," as she was given to say, with a toss of her curly head; and she had some of the virtues of soldiers. Soldiers had been about her ever since she first remembered having a wooden casserole for a cradle, and sucking down red wine through a pipe-stem. Soldiers had been her books, her teachers, her models, her guardians, and, later on, her lovers, all the days of her life. She had had no guiding-star, except the eagles on the standards; she had had no cradle-song, except the rataplan and the reveille; she had had no sense of duty taught her, except to face fire boldly, never to betray a comrade, and to worship but two deities, "la Gloire" and "la France."

Yet there were tales told in the barrack-yards and under canvas of the little Amie du Drapeau that had a gentler side. Of how softly she would touch the wounded; of how deftly she would cure them. Of how carelessly she would dash through under a raking fire, to take a draught of water to a dying man. Of how she had sat by an old Grenadier's death-couch, to sing to him, refusing to stir, though it was a fete at Chalons, and she loved fetes as only a French girl can. Of how she had ridden twenty leagues on a saddleless Arab horse, to fetch the surgeon of the Spahis to a Bedouin perishing in the desert of shot-wounds. Of how she had sent every sou of her money to her mother, so long as that mother lived—a brutal, drunk, vile-tongued old woman, who had beaten her oftentimes, as the sole maternal attention, when she was but an infant. These things were told of Cigarette, and with a perfect truth. She was a thorough scamp, but a thorough soldier, as she classified herself. Her own sex would have seen no good in her; but her comrades-at-arms could and did. Of a surety, she missed virtues that women prize; but, not less of a surety, had she caught some that they miss.

Singing her refrain, on she dashed now, swift as a greyhound, light as a hare; glancing here and glancing there as she bounded over the picturesque desolation of the Cashbah; it was just noon, and there were few could brave the noon-heat as she did; it was very still; there was only from a little distance the roll of the French kettle-drums where the drummers of the African regiments were practicing. "Hola!" cried Cigarette to herself, as her falcon-eyes darted right and left, and, like a chamois, she leaped down over the great masses of Turkish ruins, cleared the channel of a dry water-course, and alighted just in front of a Chasseur d'Afrique, who was sitting alone on a broken fragment of white marble, relic of some Moorish mosque, whose delicate columns, crowned with wind-sown grasses, rose behind him, against the deep intense blue of the cloudless sky.

He was sitting thoughtfully enough, almost wearily, tracing figures in the dry sand of the soil with the point of his scabbard; yet he had all the look about him of a brilliant French soldier, of one who, moreover, had seen hot and stern service. He was bronzed, but scarcely looked so after the red, brown, and black of the Zouaves and the Turcos, for his skin was naturally very fair, the features delicate, the eyes very soft—for which M. Tata had growled contemptuously, "a woman's face"—a long, silken chestnut beard swept over his chest; and his figure, as he leaned there in the blue and scarlet and gold of the Chasseurs' uniform, with his spurred heel thrust into the sand, and his arm resting on his knee, was, as Cigarette's critical eye told her, the figure of a superb cavalry rider; light, supple, long of limb, wide of chest, with every sinew and nerve firm-knit as links of steel. She glanced at his hands, which were very white, despite the sun of Algiers and the labors that fall to a private of Chasseurs.

"Beau lion!" she thought, "and noble, whatever he is."

But the best of blood was not new to her in the ranks of the Algerian regiments; she had known so many of them—those gilded butterflies of the Chaussee d'Antin, those lordly spendthrifts of the vieille roche, who had served in the battalions of the demi-cavalry, or the squadrons of the French Horse, to be thrust, nameless and unhonored, into a sand-hole hastily dug with bayonets in the hot hush of an African night.

She woke him unceremoniously from his reverie, with a challenge to wine.

"Ah, ha! Tata Leroux says you are English; by the faith, he must be right, or you would never sit musing there like an owl in the sunlight! Take a draught of my burgundy; bright as rubies. I never sell bad wines—not I! I know better than to drink them myself."

He started and rose; and, before he took the little wooden drinking-cup, bowed to her, raising his cap with a grave, courteous obeisance; a bow that had used to be noted in throne-rooms for its perfection of grace.

"Ah, ma belle, is it you?" he said wearily. "You do me much honor."

Cigarette gave a little petulant twist to the tap of her wine-barrel. She was not used to that style of salutation. She half liked it—half resented it. It made her wish, with an impatient scorn for the wish, that she knew how to read and had not her hair cut short like a boy's—a weakness the little vivandiere had never been visited with before.

"Morbleu!" she said pettishly. "You are too fine for us mon brave. In what country, I should wonder, does one learn such dainty ceremony as that?"

"Where should one learn courtesies, if not in France?" he answered wearily. He had danced with this girl-soldier the night before at a guinguette ball, seeing her for the first time, for it was almost the first time he had been in the city since the night when he had thrown the dice, and lost ten Napoleons and the Bedouins to Claude de Chanrellon; but his thoughts were far from her in this moment.

"Ouf! You have learnt carte and tierce with your tongue!" cried Cigarette, provoked to receive no more compliment than that. From generals and staff officers, as from drummers and trumpeters, she was accustomed to flattery and wooing, luscious as sugared chocolate, and ardent as flirtation, with a barrack flavor about it, commonly is; she would, as often as not, to be sure, finish it with the butt-end of her pistol, or the butt-end of some bit of stinging sarcasm, but still, for all that, she liked it, and resented its omission. "They say you are English, but I don't believe it; you speak too soft, and you sound the double L's too well. A Spaniard?"

"Do you find me so devout a Catholic that you think so?"

She laughed. "A Greek, then?"

"Still worse. Have you seen me cheat at cards?"

"An Austrian? You waltz like a White Coat!"

He shook his head.

She stamped her little foot into the ground—a foot fit for a model, with its shapely military boot; spurred, too, for Cigarette rode like a circus-rider.

"Say what you are, then, at once."

"A soldier of France. Can you wish me more?"

For the first time her eyes flashed and softened—her one love was the tricolor.

"True!" she said simply. "But you were not always a soldier of France? You joined, they say, twelve years ago. What were you before then?"

She here cast herself down in front of him, and, with her elbows on the sand, and her chin on her hands, watched him with all the frank curiosity and unmoved nonchalance imaginable, as she launched the question point-blank.

"Before!" he said slowly. "Well—a fool."

"You belonged in the majority, then!" said Cigarette, with a piquance made a thousand times more piquant by the camp slang she spoke in. "You should not have had to come into the ranks, mon ami; majorities—specially that majority—have very smooth sailing generally!"

He looked at her more closely, though she wearied him.

"Where have you got your ironies, Cigarette? You are so young."

She shrugged her shoulders.

"Bah! one is never young, and always young in camps. Young? Pardieu! When I was four I could swear like a grenadier, plunder like a prefet, lie like a priest, and drink like a bohemian."

Yet—with all that—and it was the truth, the brow was so open under the close rings of the curls, the skin so clear under the sun-tan, the mouth so rich and so arch in its youth!

"Why did you come into the service?" she went on, before he had a chance to answer her. "You were born in the Noblesse—bah! I know an aristocrat at a glance! Now many of those aristocrats come; shoals of them; but it is always for something. They all come for something; most of them have been ruined by the lionnes, a hundred million of francs gone in a quarter! Ah, bah! what blind bats the best of you are! They have gambled, or bet, or got into hot water, or fought too many duels or caused a court scandal, or something; all the aristocrats that come to Africa are ruined. What ruined you, M. l'Aristocrat?"

"Aristocrat? I am none. I am a Corporal of the Chasseurs."

"Diable! I have known a Duke a Corporal! What ruined you?"

"What ruins most men, I imagine—folly."

"Folly, sure enough!" retorted Cigarette, with scornful acquiescence. She had no patience with him. He danced so deliciously, he looked so superb, and he would give her nothing but these absent answers. "Wisdom don't bring men who look as you look into the ranks of the volunteers for Africa. Besides, you are too handsome to be a sage!"

He laughed a little.

"I never was one, that's certain. And you are too pretty to be a cynic."

"A what?" She did not know the word. "Is that a good cigar you have? Give me one. Do women smoke in your old country?"

"Oh, yes—many of them."

"Where is it, then?"

"I have no country—now."

"But the one you had?"

"I have forgotten I ever had one."

"Did it treat you ill, then?"

"Not at all."

"Had you anything you cared for in it?"

"Well—yes."

"What was it? A woman?"

"No—a horse."

He stooped his head a little as he said it, and traced more figures slowly in the sand.

"Ah!"

She drew a short, quick breath. She understood that; she would only have laughed at him had it been a woman; Cigarette was more veracious than complimentary in her estimate of her own sex.

"There was a man in the Cuirassiers I knew," she went on softly, "loved a horse like that;—he would have died for Cossack—but he was a terrible gambler, terrible. Not but what I like to play myself. Well, one day he played and played till he was mad, and everything was gone; and then in his rage he staked the only thing he had left. Staked and lost the horse! He never said a word; but he just slipped a pistol in his pocket, went to the stable, kissed Cossack once—twice—thrice—and shot himself through the heart."

"Poor fellow!" murmured the Chasseur d'Afrique, in his chestnut beard.

Cigarette was watching him with all the keenness of her falcon eyes; "he had gambled away a good deal too," she thought. "It is always the same old story with them."

"Your cigars are good, mon lion," she said impatiently, as she sprang up; her lithe, elastic figure in the bright vivandiere uniform standing out in full relief against the pearly gray of the ruined pillars, the vivid green of the rank vegetation, and the intense light of the noon. "Your cigars are good, but it is more than your company is! If you had been as dull as this last night, I would not have danced a single turn with you in the cancan!"

And with a bound to which indignation lent wings like a swallow's, the Friend of the Flag, insulted and amazed at the apathy with which her advances to friendship had been received, dashed off at her topmost speed, singing all the louder out of bravado. "To have nothing more to say to me after dancing with me all night!" thought Cigarette, with fierce wrath at such contumely, the first neglect the pet of the Spahis had ever experienced.

She was incensed, too, that she had been degraded into that momentary wish that she knew how to read and looked less like a boy—just because a Chasseur with white hands and silent ways had made her a grave bow! She was more incensed still because she could not get at his history, and felt, despite herself, a reluctance to bribe him for it with those cajoleries whose potency she had boasted to Tata Leroux. "Let him take care!" muttered the soldier-coquette passionately, in her little white teeth; so small and so pearly, though they had gripped a bridle tight before then, when each hand was filled with a pistol. "Let him take care! If he offend me there are five hundred swords that will thrust civility into him, five hundred shots that will teach him the cost of daring to provoke Cigarette!"

En route through the town her wayward way took the pretty brunette Friend of the Flag as many devious meandering as a bird takes in a summer's day flight, when it stops here for a berry, there for a grass seed, here to dip its beak into cherries, there to dart after a dragon-fly, here to shake its wings in a brook, there to poise on a lily-bell.

She loitered in a thousand places, for Cigarette knew everybody; she chatted with a group of Turcos, she emptied her barrel for some Zouaves, she ate sweetmeats with a lot of negro boys, she boxed a little drummer's ear for slurring over the "r'lin tintin" at his practice, she drank a demi-tasse with some officers at a cafe; she had ten minutes' pistol-shooting, where she beat hollow a young dandy of the Guides who had come to look at Algiers for a week, and made even points with one of the first shots of the "Cavalry a pied," as the Algerian antithesis runs. Finally she paused before the open French window of a snow-white villa, half-buried in tamarisk and orange and pomegranate, with the deep-hued flowers glaring in the sun, and a hedge of wild cactus fencing it in; through the cactus she made her way as easily as a rabbit burrows; it would have been an impossibility to Cigarette to enter by any ordinary means; and balancing herself lightly on the sill for a second, stood looking in at the chamber.

"Ho, M. le Marquis! the Zouaves have drunk all my wine up; fill me my keg with yours for once—the very best burgundy, mind. I'm half afraid your cellar will hurt my reputation."

The chamber was very handsome, hung and furnished in the very best Paris fashion, and all glittering with amber and ormolu and velvets; in it half a dozen men—officers of the cavalry—were sitting over their noon breakfast, and playing at lansquenet at the same time. The table was crowded with dishes of every sort, and wines of every vintage; and the fragrance of their bouquet, the clouds of smoke, and the heavy scent of the orange blossom without, mingled together in an intense perfume. He whom she addressed, M. le Marquis de Chateauroy, laughed, and looked up.

"Ah, is it thee, my pretty brunette? Take what thou wantest out of the ice pails."

"The best growths?" asked Cigarette, with the dubious air and caution of a connoisseur.

"Yes!" said M. le Marquis, amused with the precautions taken with his cellar, one of the finest in Algiers. "Come in and have some breakfast, ma belle. Only pay the toll."

Where he sat between the window and the table he caught her in his arms and drew her pretty face down; Cigarette, with the laugh of a saucy child, whisked her cigar out of her mouth and blew a great cloud of smoke in his eyes. She had no particular fancy for him, though she had for his wines; shouts of mirth from the other men completed the Marquis' discomfiture, as she swayed away from him, and went over to the other side of the table, emptying some bottles unceremoniously into her wine-keg; iced, ruby, perfumy claret that she could not have bought anywhere for the barracks.

"Hola!" cried the Marquis, "thou art not generally so coy with thy kisses, petite."

Cigarette tossed her head.

"I don't like bad clarets after good! I've just been with your Corporal, 'Bel-a-faire-peur'; you are no beauty after him, M. le Colonel."

Chateauroy's face darkened; he was a colossal-limbed man, whose bone was iron, and whose muscles were like oak-fibers; he had a dark, keen head like an eagle's; the brow narrow, but very high, looking higher because the close-cut hair was worn off the temples; thin lips hidden by heavy curling mustaches, and a skin burned black by long African service. Still he was fairly handsome enough not to have muttered so heavy an oath as he did at the vivandiere's jest.

"Sacre bleu! I wish my corporal were shot! One can never hear the last of him."

Cigarette darted a quick glance at him. "Oh, ho; jealous, mon brave!" thought her quick wits. "And why, I wonder?"

"You haven't a finer soldier in your Chasseurs, mon cher; don't wish him shot, for the good of the service," said the Viscount de Chanrellon, who had now a command of his own in the Light Cavalry of Algiers. "Pardieu! If I had to choose whether I'd be backed by 'Bel-a-faire-peur,' or by six other men in a skirmish, I'd choose him, and risk the odds."

Chateauroy tossed off his burgundy with a contemptuous impatience.

"Diable! That is the exaggerated nonsense one always hears about this fellow—as if he were a second Roland, or a revivified Bayard! I see nothing particular in him, except that he's too fine a gentleman for the ranks."

"Fine? ah!" laughed Cigarette. "He made me bow this morning like a chamberlain; and his beard is like carded silk, and he has such woman's hands, mon Dieu! But he is a croc-mitaine, too."

"Rather!" laughed Claude de Chanrellon, as magnificent a soldier himself as ever crossed swords. "I said he would eat fire the very minute he played that queer game of dice with me years ago. I wish I had him instead of you, Chateauroy; like lightning in a charge; and yet the very man for a dangerous bit of secret service that wants the softness of a panther. We all let our tongues go too much, but he says so little—just a word here, a word there—when one's wanted—no more; and he's the devil's own to fight."

The Marquis heard the praise of his Corporal, knitting his heavy brows; it was evident the private was no favorite with him.

"The fellow rides well enough," he said, with an affectation of carelessness; "there—for what I see—is the end of his marvels. I wish you had him, Claude, with all my soul."

"Oh, ha!" cried Chanrellon, wiping the Rhenish off his tawny mustaches, "he should have been a captain by this if I had. Morbleu! He is a splendid sabreur—kills as many men to his own sword as I could myself, when it comes to a hand-to-hand fight; breaks horses in like magic; rides them like the wind; has a hawk's eye over open country; obeys like clockwork; what more can you want?"

"Obeys! Yes!" said the Colonel of Chasseurs, with a snarl. "He'd obey without a word if you ordered him to walk up to a cannon's mouth, and be blown from it; but he gives you such a d——d languid grand seigneur glance as he listens that one would think he commanded the regiment."

"But he's very popular with your men, too?"

"Monsieur, the worst quality a corporal can have. His idea of maintaining discipline is to treat them to cognac and give them tobacco."

"Pardieu! Not a bad way, either, with our French fire-eaters. He knows them that he has to deal with; that brave fellow. Your squadrons would go to the devil after him."

The Colonel gave a grim laugh.

"I dare say nobody knows the way better."

Cigarette, flirting with the other officers, drinking champagne by great glassfuls, eating bonbons from one, sipping another's soup, pulling the limbs of a succulent ortolan to pieces with a relish, and devouring truffles with all the zest of a bon-vivant, did not lose a word, and catching the inflection of Chateauroy's voice, settled with her own thoughts that "Bel-a-faire-peur" was not a fair field or a smooth course with his Colonel. The weather-cock heart of the little "Friend of the Flag" veered round, with her sex's common custom, to the side that was the weakest.

"Dieu de Dieu, M. le Colonel!" she cried, while she ate M. le Colonel's foie gras with as little ceremony and as much enjoyment as would be expected from a young plunderer accustomed to think a meal all the better spiced by being stolen "by the rules of war"—"whatever else your handsome Corporal is, he is an aristocrat. Ah, ha! I know the aristocrats—I do! Their touch is so gentle, and their speech is so soft, and they have no slang of the camp, and yet they are such diablotins to fight and eat steel, and die laughing, all so quiet and nonchalant. Give me the aristocrats—the real thing, you know. Not the ginger-cakes, just gilt, that are ashamed of being honest bread—but the old blood like Bel-a-faire-peur."

The Colonel laughed, but restlessly; the little ingrate had aimed at a sore point in him. He was of the First Empire Nobility, and he was weak enough, though a fierce, dauntless iron-nerved soldier, to be discontented with the great fact that his father had been a hero of the Army of Italy, and scarce inferior in genius to Massena, because impatient of the minor one that, before strapping on a knapsack to have his first taste of war under Custine, the Marshal had been but a postilion at a posting inn in the heart of the Nivernais.

"Ah, my brunette!" he answered with a rough laugh, "have you taken my popular Corporal for your lover? You should give your old friends warning first, or he may chance to get an ugly spit on a saber."

The Amie du Drapeau tossed off her sixth glass of champagne. She felt for the first time in her life a flush of hot blood on her brown, clear cheek, well used as she was to such jests and such lovers as these.

"Ma foi!" she said coolly. "He would be more likely to spit than be spitted if it came to a duel. I should like to see him in a duel; there is not a prettier sight in the world when both men have science. As for fighting for me! Morbleau! I will thank nobody to have the impudence to do it, unless I order them out. Coqueline got shot for me, you remember; he was a pretty fellow, Coqueline, and they killed him so clumsily, that they disfigured him terribly—it was quite a pity. I said then I would have no more handsome men fight about me. You may, if you like, M. le Black Hawk."

Which title she gave with a saucy laugh, hitting with a chocolate bonbon the black African-burnt visage of the omnipotent chief she had the audacity to attack. High or low, they were all the same to Cigarette. She would have "slanged" the Emperor himself with the self-same coolness, and the Army had given her a passport of immunity so wide that it would have fared ill with anyone who had ever attempted to bring the vivandiere to book for her uttermost mischief.

"By the way!" she went on, quick as thought, with her reckless, devil-may-care gayety. "One thing! Your Corporal will demoralize the army of Africa, monsieur!"

"He shall have an ounce of cold lead before he does. What in?"

"He will demoralize it," said Cigarette, with a sagacious shake of her head. "If they follow his example we shan't have a Chasseur, or a Spahi, or a Piou-piou, or a Sapeur worth anything—"

"Sacre! What does he do?" The Colonel's strong teeth bit savagely through his cigar; he would have given much to have been able to find a single thing of insubordination or laxity of duty in a soldier who irritated and annoyed him, but who obeyed him implicitly, and was one of the most brilliant "fire-eaters" of his regiment.

"He won't only demoralize the army," pursued the Cigarette, with vivacious eloquence, "but if his example is followed, he'll ruin the Prefets, close the Bureaux, destroy the Exchequer, beggar all the officials, make African life as tame as milk and water, and rob you, M. le Colonel, of your very highest and dearest privilege!"

"Sacre bleu!" cried her hearers, as their hands instinctively sought their swords; "what does he do?"

Cigarette looked at them out of her arch black lashes.

"Why, he never thieves from the Arabs! If the fashion comes in, adieu to our occupation. Court-martial him, Colonel!"

With which sally Cigarette thrust her pretty soft curls back of her temples, and launched herself into lansquenet with all the ardor of a gambler and the vivacity of a child; her eyes flashing, her cheeks flushing, her little teeth set, her whole soul in a whirl of the game, made all the more riotous by the peals of laughter from her comrades and the wines that were washed down like water. Cigarette was a terrible little gamester, and had gaming made very easy to her, for it was the creed of the Army that her losses never counted, but her gains were paid to her often double or treble. Indeed, so well did she play, and so well did the goddess of hazard favor her, that she might have grown a millionaire on the fruits of her dice and her cards, but for this fact, that whatever the little Friend of the Flag had in her hands one hour was given away the next, to the first wounded soldier, or ailing veteran, or needy Arab woman that required the charity.

As much gold was showered on her as on Isabel of the Jockey Club; but Cigarette was never the richer for it. "Bah!" she would say, when they told her of her heedlessness, "money is like a mill, no good standing still. Let it turn, turn, turn, as fast as ever it can, and the more bread will come from it for the people to eat."

The vivandiere was by instinct a fine political economist.



Meanwhile, where she had left him among the stones of the ruined mosque, the Chasseur, whom they nicknamed Bel-a-faire-peur, in a double sense, because of his "woman's face," as Tata Leroux termed it, and because of the terror his sword had become through North Africa, sat motionless with his right arm resting on his knee, and his spurred heel thrust into the sand; the sun shining down unheeded in its fierce, burning glare on the chestnut masses of his beard and the bright glitter of his uniform.

He was a dashing cavalry soldier, who had had a dozen wounds cut over his body by the Bedouin swords, in many and hot skirmishes; who had waited through sultry African nights for the lion's tread, and had fought the desert-king and conquered; who had ridden a thousand miles over the great sand waste, and the boundless arid plains, and slept under the stars with the saddle beneath his head, and his rifle in his hand, all through the night; who had served, and served well, in fierce, arduous, unremitting work, in trying campaigns and in close discipline; who had blent the verve, the brilliance, the daring, the eat-drink-and-enjoy-for-to-morrow-we-die of the French Chasseur, with something that was very different, and much more tranquil.

Yet, though as bold a man as any enrolled in the French Service, he sat alone here in the shadow of the column, thoughtful, motionless, lost in silence.

In his left hand was a Galignani, six months old, and his eye rested on a line in the obituary:

"On the 10th ult., at Royallieu, suddenly, the Right Hon. Denzil, Viscount Royallieu; aged 90."



CHAPTER XVI.

CIGARETTE EN BACCHANTE.

Vanitas vanitatum! The dust of death lies over the fallen altars of Bubastis, where once all Egypt came down the flood of glowing Nile, and Herodotus mused under the shadowy foliage, looking on the lake-like rings of water. The Temple of the Sun, where the beauty of Asenath beguiled the Israelite to forget his sale into bondage and banishment, lies in shapeless hillocks, over which canter the mules of dragomen and chatter the tongues of tourists. Where the Lutetian Palace of Julian saluted their darling as Augustus, the sledge-hammer and the stucco of the Haussmann fiat bear desolation in their wake. Levantine dice are rattled where Hypatia's voice was heard. Bills of exchange are trafficked in where Cleopatra wandered under the palm aisles of her rose gardens. Drummers roll their caserne-calls where Drusus fell and Sulla laid down dominion.

And here—in the land of Hannibal, in the conquest of Scipio, in the Phoenicia whose loveliness used to flash in the burning, sea-mirrored sun, while her fleets went eastward and westward for the honey of Athens and the gold of Spain—here Cigarette danced the cancan!

A little hostelry of the barriere swung its sign of the As de Pique where feathery palms once had waved above mosques of snowy gleam, with marble domes and jeweled arabesques, and the hush of prayer under columned aisles. "Here are sold wine, liquor and tobacco," was written where once verses of the Koran had been blazoned by reverent hands along porphyry cornices and capitals of jasper. A Cafe Chantant reared its impudent little roof where once, far back in the dead cycles, Phoenician warriors had watched the galleys of the gold-haired favorite of the gods bear down to smite her against whom the one unpardonable sin of rivalry to Rome was quoted.

The riot of a Paris guinguette was heard where once the tent of Belisarius might have been spread above the majestic head that towered in youth above the tempestuous seas of Gothic armies, as when, silvered with age, it rose as a rock against the on-sweeping flood of Bulgarian hordes. The grisette charms of little tobacconists, milliners, flower-girls, lemonade-sellers, bonbon-sellers, and filles de joie flaunted themselves in the gaslight where the lustrous sorceress eyes of Antonina might have glanced over the Afric Sea, while her wanton's heart, so strangely filled with leonine courage and shameless license, heroism and brutality, cruelty and self-devotion, swelled under the purples of her delicate vest, at the glory of the man she at once dishonored and adored.

Vanitas vanitatum! Under the thirsty soil, under the ill-paved streets, under the arid turf, the Legions lay dead, with the Carthaginians they had borne down under the mighty pressure of their phalanx; and the Byzantine ranks were dust, side by side with the soldiers of Gelimer. And here, above the graves of two thousand centuries, the little light feet of Cigarette danced joyously in that triumph of the Living, who never remember that they also are dancing onward to the tomb.

It was a low-roofed, white-plastered, gaudily decked, smoke-dried mimicry of the guinguettes beyond Paris. The long room, that was an imitation of the Salle de Mars on a Lilliputian scale, had some bunches of lights flaring here and there, and had its walls adorned with laurel wreaths, stripes of tri-colored paint, vividly colored medallions of the Second Empire, and a little pink gauze flourished about it, that flashed into brightness under the jets of flame—trumpery, yet trumpery which, thanks to the instinct of the French esprit, harmonized and did not vulgarize; a gift French instinct alone possesses. The floor was bare and well polished; the air full of tobacco smoke, wine fumes, brandy odors, and an overpowering scent of oil, garlic and pot au feu. Riotous music pealed through it, that even in its clamor kept a certain silvery ring, a certain rhythmical cadence. Pipes were smoked, barrack slang, camp slang, barriere slang, temple slang, were chattered volubly. Theresa's songs were sung by bright-eyed, sallow-cheeked Parisiennes, and chorused by the lusty lungs of Zouaves and Turcos. Good humor prevailed, though of a wild sort; the mad gallop of the Rigolboche had just flown round the room, like lightning, to the crash and the tumult of the most headlong music that ever set the spurred heels stamping and grisettes' heels flying; and now where the crowds of soldiers and women stood back to leave her a clear place, Cigarette was dancing alone.

She had danced the cancan; she had danced since sunset; she had danced till she had tired out cavalrymen, who could go days and nights in the saddle without a sense of fatigue, and made Spahis cry quarter, who never gave it by any chance in the battlefield; and she was dancing now like a little Bacchante, as fresh as if she had just sprung up from a long summer day's rest. Dancing as she would dance only now and then, when caprice took her, and her wayward vivacity was at the height, on the green space before a tent full of general officers, on the bare floor of a barrack-room, under the canvas of a fete-day's booth, or as here in the music-hall of a Cafe.

Marshals had more than once essayed to bribe the famous little Friend of the Flag to dance for them, and had failed; but, for a set of soldiers—war-worn, dust-covered, weary with toil and stiff with wounds—she would do it till they forgot their ills and got as intoxicated with it as with champagne. For her gros bebees, if they were really in want of it, she would do anything. She would flout a star-covered general, box the ears of a brilliant aid, send killing missiles of slang at a dandy of a regiment de famille, and refuse point-blank a Russian grand duke; but to "mes enfants," as she was given to calling the rough tigers and grisly veterans of the Army of Africa, Cigarette was never capricious; however mischievously she would rally, or contemptuously would rate them, when they deserved it.

And she was dancing for them now.

Her soft, short curls all fluttering, her cheeks all bright with a scarlet flush, her eyes as black as night and full of fire; her gay little uniform, with its scarlet and purple, making her look like a fuchsia bell tossed by the wind to and fro, ever so lightly, on its delicate, swaying stem; Cigarette danced with the wild grace of an Almeh, of a Bayadere, of a Nautch girl—as untutored and instinctive in her as its song to a bird, as its swiftness to a chamois. To see Cigarette was like drinking light, fiery wines, whose intoxication was gay as mischief, and sparkling as themselves. All the warmth of Africa, all the wit of France, all the bohemianism of the Flag, all the caprices of her sex, were in that bewitching dancing. Flashing, fluttering, circling, whirling; glancing like a saber's gleam, tossing like a flower's head, bounding like an antelope, launching like an arrow, darting like a falcon, skimming like a swallow; then for an instant resting as indolently, as languidly, as voluptuously, as a water-lily rests on the water's breast—Cigarette en Bacchante no man could resist.

When once she abandoned herself to the afflatus of the dance delirium, she did with her beholders what she would. The famous Cachucha, that made the reverend cardinals of Spain fling off their pontifical vestments and surrender themselves to the witchery of the castanets and the gleam of the white, twinkling feet, was never more irresistible, more enchanting, more full of wild, soft, bizarre, delicious grace. It was a poem of motion and color, an ode to Venus and Bacchus.

All her heart was in it—that heart of a girl and a soldier, of a hawk and a kitten, of a Bohemian and an epicurean, of a Lascar and a child, which beat so brightly and so boldly under the dainty gold aiglettes, with which she laced her dashing little uniform.

In the Chambers of Zephyrs, among the Douars of Spahis, on sandy soil under African stars, above the heaped plunder brought in from a razzia, in the yellow light of candles fastened to bayonets stuck in the earth at a bivouac, on the broad deal table of a barrack-room full of black-browed conscrits indigenes, amid the thundering echoes of the Marseillaise des Bataillons shouted from the brawny chests of Zouaves, Cigarette had danced, danced, danced; till her whole vivacious life seemed pressed into one hour, and all the mirth and mischief of her little brigand's soul seemed to have found their utterance in those tiny, slender, spurred, and restless feet, that never looked to touch the earth which they lit on lightly as a bird alights, only to leave it afresh, with wider, swifter bound, with ceaseless, airy flight.

So she danced now, in the cabaret of the As de Pique. She had a famous group of spectators, not one of whom knew how to hold himself back from springing in to seize her in his arms, and whirl with her down the floor. But it had been often told them by experience that, unless she beckoned one out, a blow of her clinched hand and a cessation of her impromptu pas de seul would be the immediate result. Her spectators were renowned croc-mitaines; men whose names rang like trumpets in the ear of Kabyle and Marabout; men who had fought under the noble colors of the day of Mazagran, or had cherished or emulated its traditions; men who had the salient features of all the varied species that make up the soldiers of Africa.

There was Ben Arslan, with his crimson burnous wrapped round his towering stature, from whom Moor and Jew fled, as before a pestilence—the fiercest, deadliest, most voluptuous of all the Spahis; brutalized in his drink, merciless in his loves; all an Arab when once back in the desert; with a blow of a scabbard his only payment for forage, and a thrust of his saber his only apology to husbands; but to the service a slave, and in the combat a lion.

There was Beau-Bruno, a dandy of Turcos, whose snowy turban and olive beauty bewitched half the women of Algeria; who himself affected to neglect his conquests, with a supreme contempt for those indulgences, but who would have been led out and shot rather than forego the personal adornings for which his adjutant and his capitaine du bureau growled unceasing wrath at him with every day that shone.

There was Pouffer-de-Rire, a little Tringlo, the wittiest, gayest, happiest, sunniest-tempered droll in all the army; who would sing the camp-songs so joyously through a burning march that the whole of the battalions would break into one refrain as with one throat, and press on laughing, shouting, running, heedless of thirst, or heat, or famine, and as full of monkey-like jests as any gamins.

There was En-ta-maboull, so nicknamed from his love for that unceremonious slang phrase—a Zouave who had the history of a Gil Blas and the talent of a Crichton; the morals of an Abruzzi brigand and the wit of a Falstaff; aquiline-nosed, eagle-eyed, black-skinned as an African, with adventures enough in his life to outvie Munchausen; with a purse always penniless, as the camp sentence runs; who thrust his men through the body as coolly as others kill wasps; who roasted a shepherd over a camp-fire for contumacy in concealing Bedouin where-abouts; yet who would pawn his last shirt at the bazaar to help a comrade in debt, and had once substituted himself for, and received fifty blows on the loins in the stead of his sworn friend, whom he loved with that love of David for Jonathan which, in Caserne life, is readier found than in Club life.

There was Pattes-du-Tigre, a small, wiry, supple-limbed fire-eater, with a skin like a coal and eyes that sparkled like the live coal's flame; a veteran of the Joyeux; who could discipline his roughs as a sheepdog his lambs, and who had one curt martial law for his detachment; brief as Draco's, and trimmed to suit either an attack on the enemy or the chastisement of a mutineer, lying in one single word—"Fire."

There was Barbe-Grise, a grisly veteran of Zephyrs, who held the highest repute of any in his battalion for rushing on to a foe with a foot speed that could equal the canter of an Arab's horse; for having stood alone once the brunt of thirty Bedouins' attack, and ended by beating them back, though a dozen spearheads were launched into his body and his pantalons garances were filled with his own blood; and for framing a matchless system of night plunder that swept the country bare as a table-rock in an hour, and made the colons surrender every hidden treasure, from a pot of gold to a hen's eggs, from a caldron of couscoussou to a tom-cat.

There was Alcide Echauffourees, also a Zephyr, who had his nickname from the marvelous changes of costume with which he would pursue his erratic expedition, and deceive the very Arabs themselves into believing him a born Mussulman; a very handsome fellow, the Lauzun of his battalion, the Brummel of his Caserne; coquette with his kepi on one side of his graceful head, and his mustaches soft as a lady's hair; whose paradise was a score of dangerous intrigues, and whose seventh heaven was a duel with an infuriated husband; incorrigibly lazy, but with the Italian laziness, as of the panther who sleeps in the sun, and with such episodes of romance, mischief, love, and deviltry in his twenty-five years of existence as would leave behind them all the invention of Dumas, pere ou fils.

All these and many more like them were the spectators of Cigarette's ballet; applauding with the wild hurrah of the desert, with the clashing of spurs, with the thunder of feet, with the demoniac shrieks of irrepressible adoration and delight.

And every now and then her bright eyes would flash over the ring of familiar faces, and glance from them with an impatient disappointment as she danced; her gros bebees were not enough for her. She wanted a Chasseur with white hands and a grave smile to be among them; and she shook back her curls, and flushed angrily as she noted his absence, and went on with the pirouettes, the circling flights, the wild, resistless abandonment of her inspirations, till she was like a little desert-hawk that is intoxicated with the scent of prey borne down upon the wind, and wheeling like a mad thing in the transparent ether and the hot sun-glow.

L'As de Pique was the especial estaminet of the chasses-marais. He was in the house; she knew it; had she not seen him drinking with some others, or rather paying for all, but taking little himself, just as she entered? He was in the house, this mysterious Bel-a-faire-peur—and was not here to see her dance! Not here to see the darling of the Douars; the pride of every Chacal, Zephyr, and Chasseur in Africa; the Amie du Drapeau, who was adored by everyone, from Chefs de Bataillons to fantassins, and toasted by every drinker, from Algiers to Oran, in the Champagne of Messieurs les Generaux as in the Cric of the Loustics round a camp-fire!

He was not there; he was leaning over the little wooden ledge of a narrow window in an inner room, from which, one by one, some Spahis and some troopers of his own tribu, with whom he had just been drinking such burgundies and brandies as the place could give, had sloped away, one by one, under the irresistible attraction of the vivandiere. An attraction, however, that had not seduced them till all the bottles were emptied; bottles more in number and higher in cost than was prudent in a corporal who had but his pay, and that scant enough to keep himself, and who had known what it was to find a roll of white bread and a cup of coffee a luxury beyond all reach, and to have to sell his whole effects up to the last thing in his haversack to buy a toss of thin wine when he was dying of thirst, or a slice of melon when he was parching with African fever.

But prudence had at no time been his specialty, and the reckless life of Algeria was not one to teach it, with its frank, brotherly fellowship that bound the soldiers of each battalion, or each squadron, so closely in a fraternity of which every member took as freely as he gave; its gay, careless carpe diem camp-philosophy—the unconscious philosophy of men who enjoyed, heart and soul, if they had a chance, because they knew they might be shot dead before another day broke; and its swift and vivid changes that made tirailleurs and troopers one hour rich as a king in loot, in wine, in dark-eyed captives at the sacking of a tribe, to be the next day famished, scorched, dragging their weary limbs, or urging their sinking horses through endless sand and burning heat, glad to sell a cartouche if they dared so break regimental orders, or to rifle a hen-roost if they came near one, to get a mouthful of food; changing everything in their haversack for a sup of dirty water, and driven to pay with the thrust of a saber for a lock of wretched grass to keep their beasts alive through the sickliness of a sirocco.

All these taught no caution to any nature normally without it; and the chief thing that his regiment had loved in him whom they named Bel-a-faire-peur from the first day that he had bound his red waist-sash about his loins, and the officers of the bureau had looked over the new volunteer, murmuring admiringly in their teeth "This gallant will do great things!" had been that all he had was given, free as the winds, to any who asked or needed.

The all was slender enough. Unless he live by the ingenuity of his own manufactures, or by thieving or intimidating the people of the country, a French soldier has but barren fare and a hard struggle with hunger and poverty; and it was the one murmur against him, when he was lowest in the ranks, that he would never follow the fashion, in wringing out by force or threat the possessions of the native population. The one reproach, that made his fellow soldiers impatient and suspicious of him, was that he refused any share in those rough arguments of blows and lunges with which they were accustomed to persuade every victim they came nigh to yield them up all such treasures of food, or drink, or riches, from sheep's liver and couscoussou, to Morocco carpets and skins of brandy and coins hid in the sand, that the Arabs might be so unhappy as to own in their reach. That the fattest pullet of the poorest Bedouin was as sacred to him as the banquet of his own Chef d'Escadron, let him be ever so famished after the longest day's march, was an eccentricity, and an insult to the usages of the corps, for which not even his daring and his popularity could wholly procure him pardon.

But this defect in him was counterbalanced by the lavishness with which his pay was lent, given, or spent in the very moment of its receipt. If a man of his tribu wanted anything, he knew that Bel-a-faire-peur would offer his last sous to aid him, or, if money were all gone, would sell the last trifle he possessed to get enough to assist his comrade. It was a virtue which went far to vouch for all others in the view of his lawless, open-handed brethren of the barracks and the Camp, and made them forgive him many moments when the mood of silence and the habit of solitude, not uncommon with him, would otherwise have incensed a fraternity with whom to live apart is the deadliest charge, and the sentence of excommunication against any who dare to provoke it.

One of those moods was on him now.

He had had a drinking bout with the men who had left him, and had laughed as gayly and as carelessly, if not as riotously, as any of them at the wild mirth, the unbridled license, the amatory recitations, and the Bacchic odes in their lawless sapir, that had ushered the night in while his wines unlocked the tongues and flowed down the throats of the fierce Arab-Spahis and the French cavalrymen. But now he leaned out of the casement, with his arms folded on the sill and a short pipe in his teeth, thoughtful and solitary after the orgy whose heavy fumes and clouds of smoke still hung heavily on the air within.

The window looked on a little, dull, close courtyard, where the yellow leaves of a withered gourd trailed drearily over the gray, uneven stones. The clamor of the applause and the ring of the music from the dancing-hall echoed with a whirling din in his ear, and made in sharper, stranger contrast the quiet of the narrow court with its strip of starry sky above its four high walls.

He leaned there musing and grave, hearing little of the noise about him; there was always noise of some sort in the clangor and tumult of barrack or bivouac life, and he had grown to heed it no more than he heeded the roar of desert beasts about him, when he slept in the desert or the hills, but looked dreamily out at the little shadowy square, with the sear gourd leaves and the rough, misshapen stones. His present and his future were neither much brighter than the gloomy, walled-in den on which he gazed.

Twelve years before, when he had been ordered into the exercise-ground for the first time, to see of what mettle he was made, the instructor had watched him with amazed eyes, muttering to himself, "This is no raw recruit,—this fellow! What a rider! Dieu de Dieu! he knows more than we can teach. He has served before now—served in some emperor's picked guard!"

And when he had passed from the exercising-ground to the campaign, the Army had found him one of the most splendid of its many splendid soldiers; and in the daily folios there was no page of achievements, of exploits, of services, of dangers, that showed a more brilliant array of military deserts than his. Yet, for many years, he had been passed by unnoticed. He had now not even the cross on his chest, and he had only slowly and with infinite difficulty been promoted so far as he stood now—a Corporal in the Chasseurs d'Afrique—a step only just accorded him because wounds innumerable and distinctions without number in countless skirmishes had made it impossible to cast him wholly aside any longer.

The cause lay in the implacable enmity of one man—his Chief.

Far-sundered as they were by position, and rarely as they could come into actual contact, that merciless weight of animosity, from the great man to his soldier had lain on the other like iron, and clogged him from all advancement. His thoughts were of it now. Only to-day, at an inspection, the accidentally broken saddle-girth of a boy-conscript had furnished pretext for a furious reprimand, a volley of insolent opprobrium hurled at himself, under which he had had to sit mute in his saddle, with no other sign that he was human beneath the outrage than the blood that would, despite himself, flush the pale bronze of his forehead. His thoughts were on it now.

"There are many losses that are bitter enough," he mused; "but there is not one so bitter as the loss of the right to resent!"

A whirlwind of laughter, so loud that it drowned the music of the shrill violins and thundering drums, echoed through the rooms and shook him from his reverie.

"They are bons enfants," he thought, with a half smile, as he listened; "they are more honest in their mirth, as in their wrath, than we ever were in that old world of mine."

Amid the shouts, the crash, the tumult, the gay, ringing voice of Cigarette rose distinct. She had apparently paused in her dancing to exchange one of those passes of arms which were her specialty, in the Sabir that she, a child of the regiments of Africa, had known as her mother tongue.

"You call him a misanthrope?" she cried disdainfully. "And you have been drinking at his expense, you rascal?"

The grumbled assent of the accused was inaudible.

"Ingrate!" pursued the scornful, triumphant voice of the Vivandiere; "you would pawn your mother's grave-clothes! You would eat your children, en fricassee! You would sell your father's bones for a draught of brandy!"

The screams of mirth redoubled; Cigarette's style of withering eloquence was suited to all her auditors' tastes, and under the chorus of laughs at his cost, her infuriated adversary plucked up courage and roared forth a defiance.

"White hands and a brunette's face are fine things for a soldier. He kills women—he kills women with his lady's grace!"

"He does not pull their ears to make them give him their money, and beat them with a stick if they don't fry his eggs fast enough, as you do, Barbe-Grise," retorted the contemptuous tones of the champion of the absent. "White hands, morbleu! Well, his hands are not always in other people's pockets as yours are!"

This forcible recrimination is in high relish in the Caserne; the screams of mirth redoubled. Barbe-Grise was a redoubtable authority whom the wildest dare-devil in his brigade dared not contradict, and he was getting the worst of it under the lash of Cigarette's tongue, to the infinite glee of the whole ballroom.

"Dame!—his hands cannot work as mine can!" growled her opponent.

"Oh, ho!" cried the little lady, with supreme disdain; "they don't twist cocks' throats and skin rabbits they have thieved, perhaps, like yours; but they would wring your neck before breakfast to get an appetite, if they could touch such canaille."

"Canaille?" thundered the insulted Barbe-Grise. "If you were but a man!"

"What would you do to me, brigand?" screamed Cigarette, in fits of laughter. "Give me fifty blows of a stick, as your officers gave you last week for stealing his gun from a new soldier?"

A growl like a lion's from the badgered Barbe-Grise shook the walls; she had cast her mischievous stroke at him on a very sore point; the unhappy young conscript's rifle having been first dexterously thieved from him, and then as dexterously sold to an Arab.

"Sacre bleu!" he roared; "you are in love with this conqueror of women—this soldier aristocrat!"

The only answer to this unbearable insult was a louder tumult of laughter; a crash, a splash, and a volley of oaths from Barbe-Grise. Cigarette had launched a bottle of vin ordinaire at him, blinded his eyes, and drenched his beard with the red torrent and the shower of glass slivers, and was back again dancing like a little Bacchante, and singing at the top of her sweet, lark-like voice.

At the sound of the animated altercation, not knowing but what one of his own troopers might be the delinquent, he who leaned out of the little casement moved forward to the doorway of the dancing room; he did not guess that it was himself whom she had defended against the onslaught of the Zephyr, Barbe-Grise.

His height rose far above the French soldiers, and above most even of the lofty-statured Spahis, and her rapid glance flashed over him at once. "Did he hear?" she wondered; the scarlet flush of exercise and excitement deepened on her clear brown cheek, that had never blushed at the coarsest jests or the broadest love words of the barrack-life that had been about her ever since her eyes first opened in her infancy to laugh at the sun-gleam on a cuirassier's corslet among the baggage-wagons that her mother followed. She thought he had not heard; his face was grave, a little weary, and his gaze, as it fell on her, was abstracted.

"Oh!" thought Cigarette, with a flash of hot wrath superseding her momentary and most rare embarrassment. "You are looking at me and not thinking of me! We will soon change that!"

Such an insult she had never been subjected to, from the first day when she had danced for sweetmeats on the top of a great drum when she was three years old, in the middle of a circular camp of Tirailleurs. It sent fresh nerve into her little limbs. It made her eyes flash like so much fire, it gave her a millionfold more grace, more abandon, more heedlessness. She stamped her tiny, spurred foot petulantly.

"Quicker! Quicker!" she cried; and as the musician obeyed her, she whirled, she spun, she bounded, she seemed to live in air, while her soft curls blew off her brow, and her white teeth glanced, and her cheeks glowed with a carmine glow, and the little gold aiglettes broke across her chest with the beating of her heart that throbbed like a bird's heart when it is wild with the first breath of Spring.

She had pitted herself against him; and she won—so far.

The vivacity, the impetuosity, the antelope elegance, the voluptuous repose that now and then broke the ceaseless, sparkling movement of her dancing, caught his eyes and fixed them on her; it was bewitching, and it bewitched him for the moment; he watched her as in other days he had watched the fantastic witcheries of eastern alme, and the ballet charms of opera dancers.

This young Bohemian of the Barrack danced in the dusky glare and the tavern fumes of the As de Pique to a set of soldiers in their shirt-sleeves with their short, black pipes in their mouths, with as matchless a grace as ever the first ballerinas of Europe danced before sovereigns and dukes on the boards of Paris, Vienna, or London. It was the eastern bamboula of the Harems, to which was added all the elastic joyance, all the gay brilliancy of the blood of France.

Suddenly she lifted both her hands above her head.

It was the signal well known, the signal of permission to join in that wild vertigo for which every one of her spectators was panting; their pipes were flung away, their kepis tossed off their heads, the music clashed louder and faster and more fiery with every sound; the chorus of the Marseillaise des Bataillons thundered from a hundred voices—they danced as only men can dance who serve under the French flag, and live under the African sun. Two, only, still looked on—the Chasseur d'Afrique, and a veteran of the 10th company, lamed for life at Mazagran.

"Are you a stupid? Don't you dance?" muttered the veteran Zephyr to his silent companion.

The Chasseur turned and smiled a little.

"I prefer a bamboula whose music is the cannon, bon pere."

"Bravo! Yet she is pretty enough to tempt you?"

"Yes; too pretty to be unsexed by such a life."

His thoughts went to a woman he had loved well: a young Arab, with eyes like the softness of dark waters, who had fallen to him once in a razzia as his share of spoil, and for whom he had denied himself cards, or wine, or tobacco, or an hour at the Cafe, or anything that alleviated the privation and severity of his lot as "simple soldat," which he had been then, that she might have such few and slender comforts as he could give her from his miserable pay. She was dead. Her death had been the darkest passage in his life in Africa—but the flute-like music of her voice seemed to come on his ear now. This girl-soldier had little charm for him after the sweet, silent, tender grace of his lost Zelme.

He turned and touched on the shoulder a Chasseur who had paused a moment to get breath in the headlong whirl:

"Come, we are to be with the Djied by dawn!"

The trooper obeyed instantly; they were ordered to visit and remain with a Bedouin camp some thirty miles away on the naked plateau; a camp professedly submissive, but not so much so but that the Bureau deemed it well to profit themselves by the services of the corporal, whose knowledge of Arabic, whose friendship with the tribes, and whose superior intelligence in all such missions rendered him peculiarly fitted for errands that required diplomacy and address as well as daring and fire.

He went thoughtfully out of the noisy, reeking ballroom into the warm luster of the Algerian night; as he went, Cigarette, who had been nearer than he knew, flashed full in his eyes the fury of her own sparkling ones, while, with a contemptuous laugh, she struck him on the lips with the cigar she hurled at him.

"Unsexed? Pouf! If you have a woman's face, may I not have a man's soul? It is only a fair exchange. I am no kitten, bon zig; take care of my talons!"

The words were spoken with the fierceness of Africa; she had too much in her of the spirit of the Zephyrs and the Chacals, with whom her youth had been spent from her cradle up, not to be dangerous when roused; she was off at a bound, and in the midst of the mad whirl again before he could attempt to soften or efface the words she had overheard, and the last thing he saw of her was in a cloud of Zouaves and Spahis with the wild uproar of the music shaking riotous echoes from the rafters.

But when he had passed out of sight Cigarette shook herself free from the dancers with petulant impatience; she was not to be allured by flattery or drawn by entreaty back amongst them; she set her delicate pearly teeth tight, and vowed with a reckless, contemptuous, impetuous oath that she was tired; that she was sick of them; that she was no strolling player to caper for them with a tambourine; and with that declaration made her way out alone into the little open court under the stars, so cool, so still after the heat, and riot, and turbulence within.

There she dropped on a broad stone step, and leaned her head on her hand.

"Unsexed! Unsexed! What did he mean?" she thought, while for the first time, with a vague sense of his meaning, tears welled hot and bitter into her sunny eyes, while the pained color burned in her face. Those tears were the first that she had ever known, and they were cruel ones, though they lasted but a little time; there was too much fire in the young Bohemian of the Army not to scorch them as they rose. She stamped her foot on the stones passionately, and her teeth were set like a little terrier's as she muttered:

"Unsexed! Unsexed! Bah, Monsieur Aristocrat! If you think so, you shall find your thought right; you shall find Cigarette can hate as men hate, and take her revenge as soldiers take theirs!"



CHAPTER XVII.

UNDER THE HOUSES OF HAIR.

It was just sunset.

The far-off summits of the Djurjura were tinted with the intense glare of the distant pines and cypresses cut sharply against the rose-warmed radiance of the sky. On the slopes of the hills white cupolas and terraced gardens, where the Algerine haouach still showed the taste and luxury of Algerine corsairs, rose up among their wild olive shadows on the groves of the lentiscus. In the deep gorges that were channeled between the riven rocks the luxuriance of African vegetation ran riot; the feathery crests of tossing reeds, the long, floating leaves of plants, filling the dry water-courses of vanished streams; the broad foliage of the wild fig, and the glowing, dainty blossoms of the oleander, wherever a trace of brook, or pool, or rivulet let it put forth its beautiful coronal, growing one in another in the narrow valleys, and the curving passes, wherever broken earth or rock gave shelter from the blaze and heat of the North African day.

Farther inland the bare, sear stretches of brown plain were studded with dwarf palm, the vast shadowless plateaux were desolate as the great desert itself far beyond; and the sun, as it burned on them a moment in the glory of its last glow, found them naked and grand by the sheer force of immensity and desolation, but dreary and endless, and broken into refts and chasms, as though to make fairer by their own barren solitude the laughing luxuriance of the sea-face of the Sahel.

A moment, and the luster of the light flung its own magic brilliancy over the Algerine water-line, and then shone full on the heights of El Biar and Bouzariah, and on the lofty, delicate form of the Italian pines that here and there, Sicilian-like, threw out their graceful heads against the amber sun-glow and the deep azure of the heavens. Then swiftly, suddenly, the sun sank; twilight passed like a gray, gliding shade, an instant, over earth and sea; and night—the balmy, sultry, star-studded night of Africa,—fell over the thirsty leafage longing for its dews, the closed flowers that slumbered at its touch, the seared and blackened plains to which its coolness could bring no herbage, the massive hills that seemed to lie so calmly in its rest.

Camped on one of the bare stretches above the Mustapha Road was a circle of Arab tents; the circle was irregularly kept, and the Krumas were scattered at will; here a low one of canvas, there one of goatskin; here a white towering canopy of teleze, there a low striped little nest of shelter, and loftier than all, the stately beit el shar of the Sheik, with his standard stuck into the earth in front of it, with its heavy folds hanging listlessly in the sultry, breathless air.

The encampment stretched far over the level, arid earth, and there was more than one tent where the shadowing folds of the banner marked the abode of some noble Djied. Disorder reigned supreme, in all the desert freedom; horses and mules, goats and camels, tethered, strayed among the conical houses of hair, browsing off the littered straw or the tossed-down hay; and caldrons seethed and hissed over wood fires, whose lurid light was flung on the eagle features and the white haiks of the wanderers who watched the boiling of their mess, or fed the embers with dry sticks. Round other fires, having finished the eating of their couscousson, the Bedouins lay full-length; enjoying the solemn silence which they love so little to break, and smoking their long pipes; while through the shadows about them glided the lofty figures of their brethren, with the folds of their sweeping burnous floating in the gloom. It was a picture, Rembrandt in color, Oriental in composition; with the darkness surrounding it stretching out into endless distance that led to the mystic silence of the great desert; and above the intense blue of the gorgeous night, with the stars burning through white, transparent mists of slowly drifting clouds.

In the central tent, tall and crimson-striped, with its mighty standard reared in front, and its opening free to the night, sat the Khalifa, the head of the tribe, with a circle of Arabs about him. He was thrown on his cushions, rich enough for a seraglio, while the rest squatted on the morocco carpet that covered the bare ground, and that was strewn with round brass Moorish trays and little cups emptied of their coffee. The sides of the tent were hung with guns and swords, lavishly adorned; and in the middle stood a tall Turkish candle-branch in fretted work, whose light struggled with the white flood of the moon, and the ruddy, fitful glare from a wood fire without.

Beneath its light, which fell full on him, flung down upon another pile of cushions facing the open front of the tent, was a guest whom the Khalifa delighted to honor. Only a Corporal of Chasseurs, and once a foe, yet one with whom the Arab found the brotherhood of brave men, and on whom he lavished, in all he could, the hospitalities and honors of the desert.

The story of their friendship ran thus:

The tribe was now allied with France, or, at least, had accepted French sovereignty, and pledged itself to neutrality in the hostilities still rife; but a few years before, far in the interior and leagued with the Kabailes, it had been one of the fiercest and most dangerous among the enemies of France. At that time the Khalifa and the Chasseur met in many a skirmish; hot, desperate struggles, where men fought horse to horse, hand to hand; midnight frays, when, in the heart of lonely ravines, Arab ambuscades fell on squadrons of French cavalry; terrible chases through the heat of torrid suns, when the glittering ranks of the charging troops swept down after the Bedouins' flight; fiery combats, when the desert sand and the smoke of musketry circled in clouds above the close-locked struggle, and the Leopard of France and the Lion of Sahara wrestled in a death-grip.

In these, through four or five seasons of warfare, the Sheik and the Chasseur had encountered each other, till each had grown to look for the other's face as soon as the standards of the Bedouins flashed in the sunshine opposite the guidons of the Imperial forces; till each had watched and noted the other's unmatched prowess, and borne away the wounds of the other's home-strokes, with the admiration of a bold soldier for a bold rival's dauntlessness and skill; till each had learned to long for an hour, hitherto always prevented by waves of battle that had swept them too soon asunder, when they should meet in a duello once for all, and try their strength together till one bore off victory and one succumbed to death.

At last it came to pass that, after a lengthened term of this chivalrous antagonism, the tribe were sorely pressed by the French troops, and could no longer mass its fearless front to face them, but had to flee southward to the desert, and encumbered by its flocks and its women, was hardly driven and greatly decimated. Now among those women was one whom the Sheik held above all earthly things except his honor in war; a beautiful antelope-eyed creature, lithe and graceful as a palm, and the daughter of a pure Arab race, on whom he could not endure for any other sight than his to look, and whom he guarded in his tent as the chief pearl of all his treasures; herds, flocks, arms, even his horses, all save the honor of his tribe, he would have surrendered rather than surrender Djelma. It was a passion with him; a passion that not even the iron of his temper and the dignity of his austere calm could abate or conceal; and the rumor of it and of the beauty of its object reached the French camp, till an impatient curiosity was roused about her, and a raid that should bear her off became the favorite speculation round the picket fires at night, and in the scorching noons, when the men lay stripped to their waist—panting like tired dogs under the hot withering breath that stole to them, sweeping over the yellow seas of sands.

Their heated fancies had pictured this treasure of the great Djied as something beyond all that her sex had ever given them, and to snare her in some unwary moment was the chief thought of Zephyr and Spahi when they went out on a scouting or foraging party. But it was easier said than done; the eyes of no Frank ever fell on her, and when he was most closely driven the Khalifa Ilderim abandoned his cattle and sheep, but, with the females of the tribe still safely guarded, fell more and more backward and southward; drawing the French on and on, farther and farther across the plains, in the sickliest times of hottest drought.

Re-enforcements could swell the Imperial ranks as swiftly as they were thinned, but with the Arabs a man once fallen was a man the less to their numbers forever, and the lightning-like pursuit began to tell terribly on them; their herds had fallen into their pursuers' hands, and famine menaced them. Nevertheless, they were fierce in attack as tigers, rapid in swoop as vultures, and fought flying in such fashion that the cavalry lost more in this fruitless, worthless work than they would have done in a second Hohenlinden or Austerlitz.

Moreover, the heat was intense, water was bad and very rare, dysentery came with the scorch and the toil of this endless charge; the chief in command, M. le Marquis de Chateauroy, swore heavily as he saw many of his best men dropping off like sheep in a murrain, and he offered two hundred napoleons to whosoever should bring either the dead Sheik's head or the living beauty of Djelma.

One day the Chasseurs had pitched their camp where a few barren, withered trees gave a semblance of shelter, and a little thread of brackish water oozed through the yellow earth.

It was high noon; the African sun was at its fiercest; far as the eye could reach there was only one boundless, burning, unendurable glitter of parching sand and cloudless sky—brazen beneath, brazen above—till the desert and the heavens touched, and blent in one tawny, fiery glow in the measureless distance. The men lay under canvas, dead-beat, half-naked, without the power to do anything except to fight like thirst-maddened dogs for a draught at the shallow stream that they and their breathless horses soon drained dry.

Even Raoul de Chateauroy, though his frame was like an Arab's, and knit into Arab endurance, was stretched like a great bloodhound, chained by the sultry oppression. He was ruthless, inflexible, a tyrant to the core, and sharp and swift as steel in his rigor, but he was a fine soldier, and never spared himself any of the hardships that his regiment had to endure under him.

Suddenly the noon lethargy of the camp was broken; a trumpet-call rang through the stillness; against the amber transparency of the horizon line the outlines of half a dozen horsemen were seen looming nearer and nearer with every moment; they were some Spahis who had been out sweeping the country for food. The mighty frame of Chateauroy, almost as unclothed as an athlete's, started from its slumberous, panting rest; his eyes lightened hungrily; he muttered a fiery oath; "Mort de Dieu!—they have the woman!"

They had the woman. She had been netted near a water-spring, to which she had wandered too loosely guarded, and too far from the Bedouin encampment. The delight of the haughty Sidi's eyes was borne off to the tents of his foe, and the Colonel's face flushed darkly with an eager, lustful warmth, as he looked upon his captive. Rumor had not outboasted the Arab girl's beauty; it was lustrous as ever was that when, far yonder to the eastward, under the curled palms of Nile, the sorceress of the Caesars swept through her rose-strewn palace chambers. Only Djelma was as innocent as the gazelle, whose grace she resembled, and loved her lord with a great love.

Of her suffering her captor took no more heed than if she were a young bird dying of shot-wounds; but, with one triumphant, admiring glance at her, he wrote a message in Arabic, to send to the Khalifa, ere her loss was discovered—a message more cruel than iron. He hesitated a second, where he lay at the opening of his tent, whom he should send with it. His men were almost all half-dead with the sun-blaze. His glance chanced to light in the distance on a soldier to whom he bore no love—causelessly, but bitterly all the same. He had him summoned, and eyed him with a curious amusement—Chateauroy treated his squadrons with much the same sans-facon familiarity and brutality that a chief of filibusters uses in his.

"So! you heed the heat so little, you give up your turn of water to a drummer, they say?"

The Chasseur gave the salute with a calm deference. A faint flush passed over the sun-bronze of his forehead. He had thought the Sidney-like sacrifice had been unobserved.

"The drummer was but a child, mon Commandant."

"Be so good as to give us no more of those melodramatic acts!" said M. le Marquis contemptuously. "You are too fond of trafficking in those showy fooleries. You bribe your comrades for their favoritism too openly. Ventre bleu! I forbid it—do you hear?"

"I hear, mon Colonel."

The assent was perfectly tranquil and respectful. He was too good a soldier not to render perfect obedience, and keep perfect silence, under any goad of provocation to break both.

"Obey then!" said Chateauroy savagely. "Well, since you love heat so well, you shall take a flag of truce and my scroll to the Sidi Ilderim. But tell me, first, what do you think of this capture?"

"It is not my place to give opinions, M. le Colonel."

"Pardieu! It is your place when I bid you. Speak, or I will have the stick cut the words out of you!"

"I may speak frankly?"

"Ten thousand curses—yes!"

"Then, I think that those who make war on women are no longer fit to fight with men."

For a moment the long, sinewy, massive form of Chateauroy started from the skins on which he lay at full length, like a lion started from its lair. His veins swelled like black cords; under the mighty muscle of his bare chest his heart beat visibly in the fury of his wrath.

"By God! I have a mind to have you shot like a dog!"

The Chasseur looked at him carelessly, composedly, but with a serene deference still, as due from a soldier to his chief.

"You have threatened it before, M. le Colonel. It may be as well to do it, or the army may think you capricious."

Raoul de Chateauroy crushed a blasphemous oath through his clinched teeth, and laughed a certain short, stern, sardonic laugh, which his men dreaded more than his wrath.

"No; I will send you instead to the Khalifa. He often saves me the trouble of killing my own curs. Take a flag of truce and this paper, and never draw rein till you reach him, if your beast drop dead at the end."

The Chasseur saluted, took the paper, bowed with a certain languid, easy grace that camp life never cured him of, and went. He knew that the man who should take the news of his treasure's loss to the Emir Ilderim would, a thousand to one, perish by every torture desert cruelty could frame, despite the cover of the white banner.

Chateauroy looked after him, as he and his horse passed from the French camp in the full burning tide of noon.

"If the Arabs kill him," he thought, "I will forgive Ilderim five seasons of rebellion."

The Chasseur, as he had been bidden, never drew rein across the scorching plateau. He rode to what he knew was like enough to be death, and death by many a torment, as though he rode to a midnight love-tryst. His horse was of Arab breed—young, fleet, and able to endure extraordinary pressure, both of spur and of heat. He swept on, far and fast, through the sickly, lurid glitter of the day, over the loose sand, that flew in puffs around him as the hoofs struck it flying right and left. At last, ere he reached the Bedouin tents, that were still but slender black points against the horizon, he saw the Sheik and a party of horsemen returning from a foraging quest, and in ignorance as yet of the abduction of Djelma. He galloped straight to them, and halted across their line of march, with the folds of the little white flag fluttering in the sun. The Bedouins drew bridle, and Ilderim advanced alone. He was a magnificent man, of middle age, with the noblest type of the eagle-eyed, aquiline desert beauty. He was a superb specimen of his race, without the lean, withered, rapacious, vulture look which often mars it. His white haik floated round limbs fit for a Colossus: and under the snowy folds of his turban the olive-bronze of his bold forehead, the sweep of his jet-black beard, and the piercing luminance of his eyes had a grand and kingly majesty.

A glance of recognition from him on the lascar, who had so often crossed swords with him; and he waved back the scroll with dignified courtesy.

"Read it me."

It was read. Bitterly, blackly shameful, the few brutal words were. They netted him as an eagle is netted in a shepherd's trap.

The moment that he gave a sign of advancing against his ravishers, the captive's life would pay the penalty; if he merely remained in arms, without direct attack, she would be made the Marquis' mistress, and abandoned later to the army. The only terms on which he could have her restored were instant submission to the Imperial rule, and personal homage of himself and all his Djouad to the Marquis as the representatives of France—homage in which they should confess themselves dogs and the sons of dogs.

So ran the message of peace.

The Chasseur read on to the end calmly. Then he lifted his gaze, and looked at the Emir—he expected fifty swords to be buried in his heart.

As he gazed, he thought no more of his own doom; he thought only of the revelation before him, of what passion and what agony could be—things unknown in the world where the chief portion of his life had passed. He was a war-hardened campaigner, trained in the ruthless school of African hostilities; who had seen every shape of mental and physical suffering, when men were left to perish of gun-wounds, as the rush of the charge swept on; when writhing horses died by the score of famine and of thirst; when the firebrand was hurled among sleeping encampments, and defenseless women were torn from their rest by the unsparing hands of pitiless soldiers. But the torture which shook for a second the steel-knit frame of this Arab passed all that he had dreamed as possible; it was mute, and held in bonds of iron, for the sake of the desert pride of a great ruler's majesty; but it spoke more than any eloquence ever spoke yet on earth.

With a wild, shrill yell, the Bedouins whirled their naked sabers above their heads, and rushed down on the bearer of this shame to their chief and their tribe. The Chasseur did not seek to defend himself. He sat motionless. He thought the vengeance just.

The Sheik raised his sword, and signed them back, as he pointed to the white folds of the flag. Then his voice rolled out like thunder over the stillness of the plains:

"But that you trust yourself to my honor I would rend you limb from limb. Go back to the tiger who rules you, and tell him that—as Allah liveth—I will fall on him, and smite him as he hath never been smitten. Dead or living, I will have back my own. If he take her life, I will have ten thousand lives to answer it; if he deal her dishonor, I will light such a holy war through the length and breadth of the land that his nation shall be driven backward like choked dogs into the sea, and perish from the face of the earth for evermore. And this I swear by the Law and the Prophet!"

The menace rolled out, imperious as a monarch's, thrilling through the desert hush. The Chasseur bent his head, as the words closed. His own teeth were tightly clinched, and his face was dark.