njoying 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