oul, finding there capacities which
the outside didn't indicate or promise, and which the other kind of eye
couldn't detect. He said the mightiest military genius must fail and come
to nothing if it have not the seeing eye--that is to say, if it cannot
read men and select its subordinates with an infallible judgment. It sees
as by intuition that this man is good for strategy, that one for dash and
daredevil assault, the other for patient bulldog persistence, and it
appoints each to his right place and wins, while the commander without
the seeing eye would give to each the other's place and lose. He was
right about Joan, and I saw it. When she was a child and the tramp came
one night, her father and all of us took him for a rascal, but she saw
the honest man through the rags. When I dined with the governor of
Vaucouleurs so long ago, I saw nothing in our two knights, though I sat
with them and talked with them two hours; Joan was there five minutes,
and neither spoke with them nor heard them speak, yet she marked them for
men of worth and fidelity, and they have confirmed her judgment. Whom has
she sent for to take charge of this thundering rabble of new recruits at
Blois, made up of old disbanded Armagnac raiders, unspeakable hellions,
every one? Why, she has sent for Satan himself--that is to say, La
Hire--that military hurricane, that godless swashbuckler, that lurid
conflagration of blasphemy, that Vesuvius of profanity, forever in
eruption. Does he know how to deal with that mob of roaring devils?
Better than any man that lives; for he is the head devil of this world
his own self, he is the match of the whole of them combined, and probably
the father of most of them. She places him in temporary command until she
can get to Blois herself--and then! Why, then she will certainly take
them in hand personally, or I don't know her as well as I ought to, after
all these years of intimacy. That will be a sight to see--that fair
spirit in her white armor, delivering her will to that muck-heap, that
rag-pile, that abandoned refuse of perdition."

"La Hire!" cried Noel, "our hero of all these years--I do want to see
that man!"

"I too. His name stirs me just as it did when I was a little boy."

"I want to hear him swear."

"Of course, I would rather hear him swear than another man pray. He is
the frankest man there is, and the naivest. Once when he was rebuked for
pillaging on his raids, he said it was nothing. Said he, 'If