ish about the Roumis
killing the natives. Draw him to one side there, and leave him. The
crows will finish his affair."

The coolness with which this handsome child disposed of the fate of
what, a moment or two before, had been a sentient, breathing, vigorous
frame, sent a chill through her hearer, though he had been seasoned by a
decade of slaughter.

"No," he said briefly. "Suspicion might fall on some innocent passer-by.
Besides--he shall have a decent burial."

"Burial for an Arab--pouf!" cried Cigarette in derision. "Parbleu, M.
Bel-a-faire-peau, I have seen hundreds of our best soldiers lie rotting
on the plains with the birds' beaks at their eyes and the jackals' fangs
in their flesh. What was good enough for them is surely good enough for
him. You are an eccentric fellow--you--"

He laughed a little.

"Time was when I should have begged you not to call me any such 'bad
form'! Eccentric! I have not genius enough for that."

"Eh?" She did not understand him. "Well, you want that carrion poked
into the earth, instead of lying atop of it. I don't see much difference
myself. I would like to be in the sun as long as I could, I think, dead
or alive. Ah! how odd it is to think one will be dead some day--never
wake for the reveille--never hear the cannon or the caissons roll
by--never stir when the trumpets sound the charge, but lie there
dead--dead--dead--while the squadrons thunder above one's grave! Droll,
eh?"

A momentary pathos softened her voice, where she stood in the glistening
moonlight. That the time would ever come when her glad laughter would
be hushed, when her young heart would beat no more, when the bright,
abundant, passionate blood would bound no longer through her veins, when
all the vivacious, vivid, sensuous charms of living would be ended for
her forever, was a thing that she could no better bring home to her than
a bird that sings in the light of the sun could be made to know that
the time would come when its little, melodious throat would be frozen in
death, and give song never more.

The tone touched him--made him think less and less of her as a
dare-devil boy, as a reckless child-soldier, and more of her as what she
was, than he had done before; he touched her almost caressingly.

"Pauvre enfant! I hope that day will be very distant from you. And
yet--how bravely you risked death for me just now!"

Cigarette, though accustomed to the lawless loves of the camp, flushed
ever so slight