us welcome that might have stunned any
ears less used, and startled any nerves less steeled, to military life
than the Friend of the Flag. She signed back the shouting, disorderly
crowd with her mule-whip, as superbly as though she were a Marshal of
France signing back a whole army's mutiny.

"What children you are! You push, and scramble, and tear, like a set of
monkeys over a nut. Get out of my way, or I swear you shall none of you
have so much as a morsel of black bread--do you hear!"

It was amusing to see how they minded her contemptuous orders; how these
black-bearded fire-eaters, the terror of the country, each one of whom
could have crushed her in his grasp as a wolf crushes a lamb, slunk
back, silenced and obedient, before the imperious bidding of the little
vivandiere. They had heeded her and let her rule over them almost as
much when she had been seven years old, and her curls, now so dark, had
been yellow as corn in the sun.

"Ouf!" growled only one insubordinate, "if you had been a day and night
eating nothing but a bit of moist clay, you might be hungry too."

The humiliated supplication of the reply appeased their autocratic
sovereign. She nodded her head in assent.

"I know; I know. I have gone days on a handful of barley-ears. M. le
Colonel has his marmitons, and his fricassees, and his fine cuisine
where he camps--ho!--but we soldiers have nothing but a hunch of baked
chaff. Well, we win battles on it!"

Which was one of the impromptu proverbs that Cigarette was wont to
manufacture and bring into her discourse with an air of authority as
of one who quotes from profound scholastic lore. It was received with
a howl of applause and of ratification. The entrails often gnaw with
bitter pangs of famine in the Army of Algiers, and they knew well how
sharp an edge hunger gives to the steel.

Nevertheless, the sullen, angry roar of famished men, that is so
closely, so terribly like the roar of wild beasts, did not cease.

"Where is Biribi?" they growled. "Biribi never keeps us waiting. Those
are Biribi's beasts."

"Right," said Cigarette laconically, with a crack of her mule-whip on to
the arm of a Zouave who was attempting to make free with her convoy and
purloin a loaf off the load.

"Where is Biribi, then?" they roared in concert, a crowd of eager,
wolfish, ravenous, impatient men, hungry as camp fasting could make
them, and half inclined even to tear their darling in pieces, since she
kept them