but I thought, perhaps, as how
his lordship's death--"

"No life and no death can make any difference to me, except the death
that some day an Arbico's lunge will give me; and that is a long time
coming."

"Ah, for God's sake, Mr. Cecil, don't talk like this!"

The Chasseur gave a short, sharp shiver, and started at this name, as if
a bullet had struck him.

"Never say that again!"

Rake, Algerian-christened "Crache-au-nez-d'la-Mort," stammered a
contrite apology.

"I never have done, sir--not for never a year; but it wrung it out of me
like--you talking of wanting death in that way----"

"Oh, I don't want death!" laughed the other, with a low, indifferent
laughter, that had in it a singular tone of sadness all the while. "I
am of our friends the Spahis' opinion--that life is very pleasant with a
handsome, well-chosen harem, and a good horse to one's saddle. Unhappily
harems are too expensive for Roumis! Yet I am not sure that I am not
better amused in the Chasseurs than I was in the Household--specially
when we are at war. I suppose we must be wild animals at the core, or
we should never find such an infinite zest in the death grapple.
Good-night!"

He stretched his long, slender, symmetrical limbs out on the skins that
made his bed, and closed his eyes, with the pipe still in his mouth, and
its amber bowl resting on the carpet which the friendship and honor of
Sidi-Ilderim had strewn over the bare turf on which the house of hair
was raised. He was accustomed to sleep as soldiers sleep, in all the
din of a camp, or with the roar of savage brutes echoing from the hills
around, with his saddle beneath his head, under a slab of rock, or with
the knowledge that at every instant the alarm might be given, the drums
roll out over the night, and the enemy be down like lightning on the
bivouac. But now a name--long unspoken to him--had recalled years he
had buried far and forever from the first day that he had worn the kepi
d'ordonnance of the Army of Algeria, and been enrolled among its wild
and brilliant soldiers.

Now, long after his comrade had slept soundly, and the light in the
single bronze Turkish candle-branch had flickered and died away, the
Chasseur d'Afrique lay wakeful; looking outward through the folds of the
tent at the dark and silent camp of the Arabs, and letting his memory
drift backward to a time that had grown to be to him as a dream--a time
when another world than the world of Africa had known