e 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, an