gnal of revolt, three
parts of your comrades will join you. Now what will that end in, beau
lion?"

"Tell me--you are a soldier yourself, you say."

"Yes, I am a soldier!" said Cigarette between her tight-set teeth, while
her eyes brightened, and her voice sank down into a whisper that had
a certain terrible meaning in it, like the first dropping of the
scattered, opening shots in the distance before a great battle
commences; "and I have seen war, not holiday war, but war in
earnest--war when men fall like hailstones, and tear like tigers, and
choke like mad dogs with their throats full of blood and sand; when the
gun-carriage wheels go crash over the writhing limbs, and the horses
charge full gallop over the living faces, and the hoofs beat out the
brains before death has stunned them senseless. Oh, yes! I am a soldier,
and I will tell you one thing I have seen. I have seen soldiers mutiny,
a squadron of them, because they hated their chief and loved two of
their sous-officers; and I have seen the end of it all--a few hundred
men, blind and drunk with despair, at bay against as many thousands, and
walled in with four lines of steel and artillery, and fired on from a
score of cannon-mouths--volley on volley, like the thunder--till not one
living man was left, and there was only a shapeless, heaving, moaning
mass, with the black smoke over all. That is what I have seen; you will
not make me see it again?"

Her face was very earnest, very eloquent, very dark, and tender with
thought; there was a vein of grave, even of intense feeling, that ran
through the significant words to which tone and accent lent far more
meaning than lay in their mere phrases; the little bohemian lost her
insolence when she pleaded for her "children," her comrades; and the
mischievous pet of the camp never treated lightly what touched the
France that she loved--the France that, alone of all things in her
careless life, she held in honor and reverence.

"You will not make me see it again?" she said, once more leaning out,
with her eyes, that were like a brown brook sparkling deep, yet bright
in the sun, fixed on him. "They would rise at your bidding, and they
would be mowed down like corn. You will not?"

"Never! I give you my word."

The promise was from his heart. He would have endured any indignity,
any outrage, rather than have drawn into ruin, through him, the fiery,
fearless, untutored lives of the men who marched, and slept, and rode,