scene."

The Princesse Corona listened; and her attention wandered farther from
the Archduke, the Peer, and the diplomatist, as from the Vaudeville. She
did not find Mme. Doche very charming; and she was absorbed for a time
looking at the miniatures on her fan.

At the same moment, through the lighted streets of Algiers, Cigarette,
like a union of fairy and of fury, was flying with the news. Cigarette
had seen the flame of war at its height, and had danced in the midst of
its whitest heat, as young children dance to see the fires leap red in
the black winter's night. Cigarette loved the battle, the charge, the
wild music of bugles, the thunder-tramp of battalions, the sirocco-sweep
of light squadrons, the mad tarantala of triumph when the slaughter
was done, the grand swoop of the Eagles down unto the carnage, the wild
hurrah of France.

She loved them with all her heart and soul; and she flew now through the
starlit, sultry night, crying, "La guerre! La guerre! La guerre!"
and chanting to the enraptured soldiery a "Marseillaise" of her own
improvisation, all slang, and doggerel, and barrack grammar; but
fire-giving as a torch, and rousing as a bugle in the way she sang it,
waving the tricolor high over her head.

CHAPTER XXVI.

ZARAILA.

The African day was at its noon.

From the first break of dawn the battle had raged; now, at midday, it
was at its height. Far in the interior, almost on the edge of the great
desert, in that terrible season when air that is flame by day is ice by
night, and when the scorch of a blazing sun may be followed in an hour
by the blinding fury of a snow-storm, the slaughter had gone on, hour
through hour, under a shadowless sky, blue as steel, hard as a sheet of
brass. The Arabs had surprised the French encampment, where it lay in
the center of an arid plain that was called Zaraila. Hovering like a
cloud of hawks on the entrance of the Sahara, massed together for one
mighty, if futile, effort--with all their ancient war-lust, and with a
new despair--the tribes who refused the yoke of the alien empire
were once again in arms; were once again combined in defense of those
limitless kingdoms of drifting sand, of that beloved belt of bare and
desolate land so useless to the conqueror, so dear to the nomad. When
they had been, as it had been thought, beaten back into the desert
wilderness; when, without water and without cattle, it had been
calculated that they would, of sheer nec