, their houses
of hair were spread for him; had he want of flight, the swiftest and
most precious of their horses was at his service; had he thirst,
they would have died themselves, wringing out the last drop from the
water-skin for him. Through him their alliance, or more justly to speak,
their neutrality, was secured to France, and the Bedouin Chief loved him
with a great, silent, noble love that was fast rooted in the granite
of his nature. Between them there was a brotherhood that beat down the
antagonism of race, and was stronger than the instinctive hate of the
oppressed for all who came under the abhorred standard of the usurpers.
He liked the Arabs, and they liked him; a grave courtesy, a preference
for the fewest words and least demonstration possible, a marked opinion
that silence was golden, and that speech was at best only silver-washed
metal, an instinctive dread of all discovery of emotion, and a limitless
power of resisting and suppressing suffering, were qualities the nomads
of the desert and the lion of the Chasseurs d'Afrique had in common; as
they had in unison a wild passion for war, a dauntless zest in danger,
and a love for the hottest heat of fiercest battle.

Silence reigned in the tent, beyond whose first division, screened by a
heavy curtain of goat's hair, the beautiful young Djelma played with
her only son, a child of three or four summers; the Sheik lay mute, the
Djouad and Marabouts around never spoke in his presence unless their
lord bade them, and the Chasseur was stretched motionless, his elbow
resting on a cushion of Morocco fabric, and his eyes looking outward at
the restless, changing movement of the firelit, starlit camp.

After the noise, the mirth, the riotous songs, and the gay, elastic good
humor of his French comrades, the silence and the calm of the Emir's
"house of hair" were welcome to him. He never spoke much himself; of
a truth, his gentle, immutable laconism was the only charge that his
comrades ever brought against him. That a man could be so brief in
words, while yet so soft in manner, seemed a thing out of all nature to
the vivacious Frenchmen; that unchanging stillness and serenity in one
who was such a reckless, resistless croc-mitaine, swift as fire in the
field, was an enigma that the Cavalry and the Demi-cavalry of Algeria
never solved. His corps would have gone after him to the devil, as
Claude de Chanrellon had averred; but they would sometimes wax a little
impa