Timbuctoo cook to the emperor; two thousand
francs mine. Ha, ha, ha, ha!"

And he laughed, doubling himself up, roaring, with wild delight in his
glances.

When the officer, who understood his strange manner of expressing
himself, had questioned him he said:

"Well, au revoir, Timbuctoo. I will see you again."

The negro rose, this time shaking the hand that was extended to him and,
smiling still, cried:

"Good-day, good-day, my lieutenant!"

He went off so happy that he gesticulated as he walked, and people
thought he was crazy.

"Who is that brute?" asked the colonel.

"A fine fellow and a brave soldier. I will tell you what I know about
him. It is funny enough.

"You know that at the commencement of the war of 1870 I was shut up in
Bezieres, that this negro calls Bezi. We were not besieged, but
blockaded. The Prussian lines surrounded us on all sides, outside the
reach of cannon, not firing on us, but slowly starving us out.

"I was then lieutenant. Our garrison consisted of soldier of all
descriptions, fragments of slaughtered regiments, some that had run away,
freebooters separated from the main army, etc. We had all kinds, in fact
even eleven Turcos [Algerian soldiers in the service of France], who
arrived one evening no one knew whence or how. They appeared at the gates
of the city, exhausted, in rags, starving and dirty. They were handed
over to me.

"I saw very soon that they were absolutely undisciplined, always in the
street and always drunk. I tried putting them in the police station, even
in prison, but nothing was of any use. They would disappear, sometimes
for days at a time, as if they had been swallowed up by the earth, and
then come back staggering drunk. They had no money. Where did they buy
drink and how and with what?

"This began to worry me greatly, all the more as these savages interested
me with their everlasting laugh and their characteristics of overgrown
frolicsome children.

"I then noticed that they blindly obeyed the largest among them, the one
you have just seen. He made them do as he pleased, planned their
mysterious expeditions with the all-powerful and undisputed authority of
a leader. I sent for him and questioned him. Our conversation lasted
fully three hours, for it was hard for me to understand his remarkable
gibberish. As for him, poor devil, he made unheard-of efforts to make
himself intelligible, invented words, gesticulated, perspired in his
anxiety, mopping