l soldiers would do anything I have done," retorted Cigarette, who
never took a compliment at the expense of her "children." "They do not
all get the opportunity, look you. Opportunity is a little angel; some
catch him as he goes, some let him pass by forever. You must be quick
with him, for he is like an eel to wriggle away. If you want a good
soldier, take that aristocrat of the Chasse-Marais--that beau Victor.
Pouf! All his officers were down; and how splendidly he led the troop!
He was going to die with them rather than surrender. Napoleon"--and
Cigarette uncovered her curly head reverentially as at the name of a
deity--"Napoleon would have given him his brigade ere this. If you had
seen him kill the chief!"

"He will have justice done him, never fear. And for you--the Cross
shall be on your breast, Cigarette, if I live over to-night to write my
dispatches."

And the Chef de Bataillon saluted her once more, and turned away to view
the carnage-strewn plain, and number the few who remained out of those
who had been wakened by the clash of the Arab arms in the gray of the
earliest dawn.

Cigarette's eyes flashed like sun playing on water, and her flushed
cheeks grew scarlet. Since her infancy it had been her dream to have the
Cross, to have the Grande Croix to lie above her little lion's heart; it
had been the one longing, the one ambition, the only undying desire of
her soul; and lo! she touched its realization!

The wild, frantic, tumultuous cheers and caresses of her soldiery, who
could not triumph in her and triumph with her enough to satiate them,
recalled her to the actual moment. She sprang down from her elevation,
and turned on them with a rebuke. "Ah! you are making this fuss about me
while hundreds of better soldiers than I lie yonder. Let us look to them
first; we will play the fool afterward."

And, though she had ridden fifty miles that day, if she had ridden
one--though she had eaten nothing since sunrise, and had only had one
draught of bad water--though she was tired, and stiff, and bruised, and
parched with thirst, Cigarette dashed off as lightly as a young goat
to look for the wounded and the dying men who strewed the plain far and
near.

She remembered one whom she had not seen after that first moment in
which she had given the word to the squadrons to charge.

It was a terrible sight--the arid plain, lying in the scarlet glow of
sunset, covered with dead bodies, with mutilated limbs, with ho