f, his head nodded
mechanically at every mouthful achieved.

"I gotta call it off, Jack," he yawned. "Stick and I need the sleep if you
don't. So here's where we quit----"

"Let me tell you about that girl," began Burley. "I never saw a
prettier--" But Glenn had appetite neither for food nor romance:

"Say, listen. Have a heart, Jack! We need the sleep!"

Stick had already risen; Glenn shoved back his chair with a gigantic yawn
and shambled to his feet.

"I want to tell you," insisted Burley, "that she's what the French call
tray, tray chick----"

Stick pointed furiously at the fowl:

"Chick? I'm fed up on chick! Maybe she is some chick, as you say, but it
doesn't interest me. Goo'bye. Don't come battering at my door and wake me
up, Jack. Be a sport and lemme alone----"

He turned and shuffled out, and Glenn followed, his Mexican spurs
clanking.

Burley jeered them:

"Mollycoddles! Come on and take in the town with us!"

But they slammed the door behind them, and he heard them stumbling and
clanking up stairs.

So Burley, gazing gravely at his empty plate, presently emptied the last
visible bottle of Bordeaux, then stretching his mighty arms and superb
chest, fished out a cigarette, set fire to it, unhooked the cartridge-belt
and holster from the back of his chair, buckled it on, rose, pulled on his
leather-peaked cap, and drew a deep breath of contentment.

For a moment he stood in the centre of the room, as though in pleasant
meditation, then he slowly strode toward the street door, murmuring to
himself: "Tray, tray chick. The prettiest girl in the world.... La ploo
belle fille du monde ... la ploo belle...."

He strolled as far as the corral down in the meadow by the stream, where
he found the negro muleteers asleep and the mules already watered and fed.

For a while he hobnobbed with the three gendarmes on duty there,
practicing his kind of French on them and managing to understand and be
understood more or less--probably less.

But the young man was persistent; he desired to become that easy master of
the French language that his tongue-tied comrades believed him to be. So
he practiced garrulously upon the polite, suffering gendarmes.

He related to them his experience on shipboard with a thousand mutinous
mules to pacify, feed, water, and otherwise cherish. They had, it
appeared, encountered no submarines, but enjoyed several alarms from
destroyers which eventually proved to be British.

"A