lay looking at
his corporal with an odd gleam in the dark, sullen savage depths of his
hollow eyes. He was not going to say a word of thanks; no! none had ever
heard a grateful or a decent word from him in his life; he was proud of
that. He was the most foul-mouthed brute in the army, and, like Snake
in the School for Scandal, thought a good action would have ruined
his character forever. Nevertheless, there came into his cunning and
ferocious eyes a glisten of the same light which had been in the little
gamin's when, first by the bivouac fire, he had murmured, "Picpon s'en
souviendra."

"When anybody stole from me," muttered Cigarette, "I shot him."

"You would have fed him, had he been starving. Do not belie yourself,
Cigarette; you are too generous ever to be vindictive."

"Pooh! Revenge is one's right."

"I doubt that. We are none of us good enough to claim it, at any rate."

Cigarette shrugged her shoulders in silence; then, posing herself on the
wheel, she sprang from thence on to the back of her little mare,
which she had brought up; having the reins in one of her hands and
the wine-bowl in the other, and was fresh and bright after the night's
repose.

"I will ride with you, with my Spahis," she said, as a young queen might
have promised protection for her escort. He thanked her, and sank back
among the straw, exhausted and worn out with pain and with languor; the
weight that seemed to oppress his chest was almost as hard to bear as
when the actual pressure of his dead charger's body had been on him.

Yet, as he had said, it was but a bagatelle, beside the all but mortal
wounds, the agonizing neuralgia, the prostrating fever, the torture of
bullet-torn nerves, and the scorching fire of inflamed sword-wounds
that had in their turn been borne by him in his twelve years of African
service--things which, to men who have never suffered them, sound like
the romanced horrors of an exaggerated imagination; yet things which are
daily and quietly borne, by such soldiers of the Algerian Army, as the
natural accompaniments of a military life--borne, too, in brave, simple,
unconscious heroism by men who know well that the only reward for it
will be their own self-contentment at having been true to the traditions
of their regiment.

Four other troopers were placed on the straw beside him, and the
mule-carts with their mournful loads rolled slowly out of camp, eastward
toward the quarters of the main army; the Spahis,