went
slowly out of the great court with the handful of Napoleons thrust in
the folds of his sash.

Rather unconsciously than by premeditation his steps turned through
the streets that led to his old familiar haunt, the As de Pique; and
dropping down on a bench under the awning, he asked for a draught of
water. It was brought him at once; the hostess, a quick, brown little
woman from Paris, whom the lovers of Eugene Sue called Rogolette, adding
of her own accord a lump of ice and a slice or two of lemon, for which
she vivaciously refused payment, though generosity was by no means her
cardinal virtue.

"Bel-a-faire-peur" awakened general interest through Algiers; he brought
so fiery and so daring a reputation with him from the wars and raids of
the interior, yet he was so calm, so grave, so gentle, so listless. It
was known that he had made himself the terror of Kabyle and Bedouin,
yet here in the city he thanked the negro boy who took him a glass
of lemonade at an estaminet, and sharply rebuked one of his men for
knocking down an old colon with a burden of gourds and of melons; such
a Roumi as this the good people of the Franco-African capital held as a
perfect gift of the gods, and not understanding one whit, nevertheless
fully appreciated.

He did not look at the newspapers she offered him; but sat gazing out
from the tawny awning, like the sail of a Neapolitan felucca, down the
checkered shadows and the many-colored masses of the little, crooked,
rambling, semi-barbaric alley. He was thinking of the Napoleons in his
sash and of the promise he had pledged to Cigarette. That he would
keep it he was resolved. The few impressive, vivid words of the young
vivandiere had painted before him like a picture the horrors of mutiny
and its hopelessness; rather than that, through him, these should befall
the men who had become his brethren-in-arms, he felt ready to let the
Black Hawk do his worst on his own life. Yet a weariness, a bitterness,
he had never known in the excitement of active service came on him,
brought by this sting of insult brought from the fair hand of an
aristocrate.

There was absolutely no hope possible in his future. The uttermost that
could ever come to him would be a grade something higher in the army
that now enrolled him; the gift of the cross, or a post in the bureau.
Algerine warfare was not like the campaigns of the armies of Italy
or the Rhine, and there was no Napoleon here to discern with uner