Front matter (continued 2)

THE LITTLE PRINCE

I

He was a man of twenty-eight or so, and he had not entered the Legion in the ordinary manner, by way of a draft from Oran. He had enlisted at Sidi-bel-Abbès.

Jacques had begun by disliking him, on account of his fine airs and finicking ways. Faced with the ordinary, depressing, everyday duties of a légionnaire's life, Karasloff—for that was the name the newcomer had enlisted under—after a first momentary revolt had accepted everything with the air of a fatalist. He evidently possessed some money, as he was able to pay for small services such as the washing of his fatigue uniform and the cleaning of his equipment, but he rarely stood treat in the canteen and he was not over-generous with his cigarettes. Every evening he left the barracks with the rest and went off to Sidi-bel-Abbès, but he was scarcely ever seen on the Place Sadi Carnot, where the légionnaires congregated to hear the band; Sidi-bel-Abbès swallowed him, and no man knew where he went or what he did with his time, and no man particularly cared.

Now Karasloff was most evidently a gentleman, a man of refinement, and most certainly a man with a past, and in any other regiment in the world there would have been much speculation and gossip as to where he came from, who he was and what he had done; but the Legion cares about nothing but itself, it heeds neither the past nor the future, and the past of Karasloff was of no interest to it.

Jacques had begun by disliking this man, then he had taken an interest in him, and had finished by becoming his friend.

There was something strangely childlike and simple in the character of Karasloff that developed on closer acquaintanceship; it puzzled Jacques; what puzzled him more was the mystery of how Karasloff spent his time when off duty.

One day, some two months or so after they had struck up their friendship, Jacques, coming back from the drill ground with the other, put the question point-blank. "Look here," said he, "I'm not the man to poke his nose into another man's business, but I want to know something, all the same. What do you do with yourself of an evening? Why don't you come to the Place to hear the band, or go to one of the cafés, like the rest of us? You make off and vanish—well, what do you do with yourself?"

Karasloff smiled.

"I do not go to hear the band," said he, "maybe because music stirs up memories, and as to the cafés, I have never been a frequenter of cafés. What do I do with myself? Well, I will not tell you; but if you come with me this evening I will show you."

"I'll come," said Jacques.

He was vastly interested in this business, there was something mysterious in the evasive reply and the manner of Karasloff. What was this mysterious occupation or amusement that held his friend every evening from six till ten? He remembered one légionnaire who used to disappear from barracks like this, and who, it turned out afterwards, was assisting in the management of a café; could Karasloff be so employed? Jacques' fertile brain busied itself all that day turning over suggestions and ideas on the subject without finding anything plausible, and at six o'clock, still in the dark, he started off with his secretive companion for Sidi-bel-Abbès.

"I have been trying to guess what you will show me," said he, "and what business it is that you are engaged in."

"I will give you three guesses," said Karasloff, laughing, "and five francs if you hit the mark."

"Good," said Jacques. "Well, then, you are running a café."

"No."

"A gambling shop."

"No."

"Ah, I have it—an opium den."

"No."

"Deuce. I give in—maybe you have turned Mussulman and spend your time at the mosque."

"No. I am still a good Christian—I hope."

"Well, it is beyond me and it seems that I am not to win that five francs—well, we will see."

"Yes," said Karasloff, laughing, "we will see."

They reached the gates and passed through to the great boulevard cutting the town north and south.

Leading the way, Karasloff turned from the boulevard down a street narrow and roofed with the blue evening sky, less a street than a bazaar, where the stalls exposed all sorts of merchandise for sale, pottery, oriental stuffs, carpets, pipe-stems and oriental tobacco, Arab gums faked and made in Paris, Rahat Lakhoum, scent.

Before one of these shops that exposed oriental stuffs and carpets for sale Karasloff paused, then, glancing up and down the street to make sure that there were no other légionnaires about, he entered, followed by Jacques.

El Kobir was the name of the merchant who owned the premises; he was seated amongst his wares engaged in mending a rug; around him lay bales of rugs just arrived and filling the air with a vague perfume, the very fume of the East, calling up the bazaars of Samarkand and the looms of Persia.

El Kobir was wealthy; he sold his goods to the travellers who came to Sidi-bel-Abbès and to well-to-do inhabitants of the town, but his export trade was his stand-by. He had a shop in Vienna managed by his brother, and correspondents in London and Paris. With the very same hand with which now he was repairing a defect in the rose-coloured rug on his knees he could, without feeling the loss, have written you a very large cheque on the Crédit Lyonnais; white-bearded and fragile-looking, he had, yet, made the pilgrimage to Mecca for the second time only a year ago.

El Kobir bowed to Karasloff without rising, wished him good evening, and, turning his head, called out something in Arabic as though he were addressing some person in the back premises.

Karasloff introduced Jacques, they sat down, and whilst they were talking a curtain moved aside and a little boy of eight years or so appeared, glanced at Jacques, and then ran up to Karasloff, who put his arm round him.

"This is Ivan," said Karasloff. "He is my son. Ivan, this is my very good friend, Corporal Jacques—give him your hand."

Ivan held out his little hand, which Jacques took in his hard and horny fist. He was a pretty child, delicate-looking, and dark-eyed, dressed in the European style with the exception of a fez, which he wore as if born to it. Having shaken hands with Jacques, he took shelter again with his father, and the talk interrupted by his entrance went on.

Coffee was brought in by an Arab woman, and cigarettes. El Kobir talked about business and how Sidi-bel-Abbès was falling off in foreign visitors, and Jacques, set going by the coffee and the general atmosphere of mild festivity, talked of the Legion and its desperate adventures, not excluding his own.

Whatever the secret of personality may be that attracts children to grown-up people, Jacques must have possessed it, for in half an hour Ivan was sitting on his knee listening to his wild tales, enraptured and worshipping.

Karasloff looked on, pleased and rather astonished, whilst El Kobir, almost as much of a child as Ivan, listened also to Jacques telling of the great fight down by the Oasis of the Five Palms, of how the water gave out and of how he, Jacques, had fought hand to hand with the chief of the insurgent Arabs and spitted him like this—see——!

When it was time to return to barracks, Jacques and Karasloff walked off, the former promising to come again soon.

"So you see," said Karasloff, when they were in the street, "that is how I have been spending my evenings; better than in a café, eh?"

"Mon Dieu, yes," replied the other; "but tell me it all, how is your little son here in Sidi-bel-Abbès and you a légionnaire—what is the meaning of it?"

"My friend," said Karasloff, "I was once a man in a very high position. I had a wife who died and a little son who lived. Then a tragedy happened, and I came to grief. I had to leave my country and hide myself in the Legion, but I could not leave my son. He and I arrived at Sidi-bel-Abbès, we put up at the Hôtel d'Oran, and on our first evening here I walked out to see what I could do in the way of a home for Ivan. When I got to see the physiognomy of the town, I came to the conclusion that the thing was impossible. Sidi-bel-Abbès is not the town in which to leave a child boarded out with a stranger. I was in despair, but there is a Providence, without doubt there is a Providence; the very fact of the existence of Love would make one believe in a protecting Power—well, that evening I was returning to the hotel and I had the choice of two streets to come back by, and I chose the Rue Victor Hugo. Half-way down it there was a crowd. A tipsy Spahi just back from Senegal had fallen foul of an old man. The Spahi had the old fellow by the beard and was about to strike him—kill him, perhaps, when I felled the Spahi with a blow just beneath the ear. It is necessary to be brutal at times, to strike hard, and to strike swiftly. I would have had trouble over this business, had the military police come along, but luckily for me it was one of the mounted Arab police that was attracted by the crowd, and when he heard the story and found that I had been defending a true believer he made no trouble. The old man was El Kobir.

"I walked with him home to his shop, which was only a little way off, and he was so full of gratitude and seemed such a good man altogether that I put my case before him and asked him could he tell me what to do with Ivan.

"He saw my point at once and that it would never do to leave the child with any promiscuous person; he was such a gentleman that he never once asked my reason for joining the Legion, he just proposed that I should let Ivan stay with him.

"'I have no family,' said he, 'and the child, if he is a good child, will not be in the way.'

"I suggested that I should pay for the child's keep, but he would not hear of it—well, that's how it was, and I come up and see Ivan every evening; the child is happy enough. El Kobir has a good many well-to-do friends and Ivan goes and plays with their children, but he is always there to meet me in the evening."

"Well," said Jacques, "you were safe in offering that five francs. I never would have guessed what you were after; we don't have much to do with children in the Legion, and that's a fact; but it seems to me now there is a good deal of sense in children, and the man who has one, and looks after it, spends his time better than sitting round in the canteen or in the cafés. I'll come with you some other evening, if I may?"

"With pleasure," said Karasloff.

Often after that Jacques accompanied his friend to El Kobir's, and there in the twilight of the shop, whilst Karasloff smoked cigarettes and talked of his friends, the child and the légionnaire would amuse themselves, taking redoubts made of bales of rugs, practising the bayonet exercises with the measuring-stick, drilling, or telling the most extraordinary yarns, for Ivan had his own stock of stories picked up from his little Moslem friends, and had you listened to him you would have recognized in a mutilated form the doings of the old heroes of the "Nights"—the Chinese Magician, Aladdin, The Three Calenders and the D'jin imprisoned by the seal of the great "Zuleiman."

A tremendous friendship struck up between the légionnaire and the child, and now, during all his leisure time at the barracks, Jacques busied himself with an old knife and some small blocks of wood, picked up from who knows where. The légionnaires are always making things, tobacco-boxes, baskets, knife-handles, and what not, to sell for a few sous to spend on drink or tobacco.

Jacques was making a wooden corporal and six légionnaires, excellent reproductions of the original things, three inches high and each able to stand on its own feet. They were in full marching uniform, blue overcoats turned back to show the red trousers, knapsack and all.

They took two months in the making and a lot of trouble in obtaining the paint for the coats and trousers, but they were finished for the time appointed: Christmas Day.

Karasloff, who had seen the making of the things, was much moved when he found that they were for Ivan, but he said scarcely anything. Ivan did all the thanking, and the valiant wooden soldiers formed another bond, if such a thing were wanted, between himself and the légionnaire.

One day Karasloff said to Jacques, "Life in the Legion is a healthy life; though hard enough at times, the work is not without interest, one has the sunshine and the blue sky and the good wine is only three sous a bottle. All the same, this life in the Legion is killing me."

II

Jacques looked at Karasloff in surprise. He had noticed lately that Karasloff was growing thinner.

"Killing you!" said Jacques. "What ails you?"

The Slav smiled and shrugged his shoulders.

"I think it is this way with men," said he, "they do not bear transplanting. The real soil in which the mind grows is the social condition to which it is accustomed. Minds die when torn up by the roots from everything to which they have been used to. Then there are some men whose bodies are affected by their minds, and to whom mental decay means bodily decay—that is how it is."

All this was Greek to Jacques.

"You will get all right," said he; "a turn with the Arabs will put new life in you, and they say we are likely to be sent down south after them any day."

But the expedition against the Arabs did not come off, and Karasloff did not get all right; on the contrary the mysterious malady that had seized him developed with alarming rapidity, it was acute phthisis; he was taken into hospital, and one day Jacques, receiving an urgent message, went there to find him dying.

Karasloff had sent for him to speak to him about Ivan. They had a long talk, and after it Jacques returned to barracks looking troubled and perplexed.

Karasloff died the next day and was buried on the day following in the cemetery of the légionnaires with military honours.

It was decided between Jacques and El Kobir to say nothing to Ivan about the death of his father.

"Life has trouble enough," said the old man. "He would gain nothing by knowing—only grief; we will tell him that his father has gone on a journey. I will keep him in my house and he will be to me as my own child, and you can come to see him of an evening as usual."

Jacques, nothing loth, agreed, and things went on just as before with the exception of Karasloff's absence from the evening meetings at the shop of El Kobir.

The effect of the child on Jacques had been profound. This scamp, who had started in life as an Apache and who had gone through the fire of the Legion, so that one might have fancied his soul scorched for ever, developed under the influence of the child quite unsuspected qualities and possibilities.

The miraculous and sometimes appalling influence of mind upon mind, and personality upon personality, was never more in evidence than in the case of Ivan and Jacques.

You might have preached to Jacques; you might have beaten him, tortured him, shown him visions or showered wisdom upon him without producing any permanent effect upon his cynical bandit mind, not an evil mind, but a mind set in narrow ways, with narrow and oblique outlooks upon life.

Ivan touched the humanity in the man because Ivan was absolutely human. I think children are the only real human beings, other people are either men or women. However that may be, in the presence of Ivan Jacques became something like Ivan, a very simple individual, not above playing with wooden soldiers or converting himself into a horse for the child to ride upon.

He would take him out sometimes on a Sunday—Sunday is a whole holiday in the Legion—for walks on the ramparts, and the fact becoming known among his companions, he told the whole story right out about Karasloff, and as a result the regiment took an interest in the child.

Ivan made his appearance in the barrack-yard sometimes hand in hand with his friend. It was wonderland to him. The drums and bugles, the légionnaires saluting their officers, the sentinels with fixed bayonets, the glare, the dust, the military atmosphere, all these things were for him splendid beyond words, fascinating beyond a grown-up person's idea of fascination. To be a légionnaire, what gifts could fortune hold out to mortal greater than that?

Then these august beings joked with him and sometimes patted him on the head, pulled out their bayonets from their scabbards and pretended to stab him, taught him how to salute and nicknamed him the Corporal.

Then, one day, surrounded with jesting légionnaires, he and Beaujon, the regimental tailor, had an interview, and Beaujon measured him as if for fun, took the girth of his chest and the length of his legs and arms, and then—a week later—Jacques appeared one evening at the shop of El Kobir with a bundle. It was a little uniform for Ivan to be worn on festive occasions, a complete corporal's uniform, képi and all.

Jacques for some time past had been out of sorts, with the manner of a man who has something weighing upon his mind.

To-night he seemed more gloomy than ever, and when Ivan, after showing himself in his new uniform, went off to have it changed, Jacques turned to El Kobir.

"All the same," said he, "the child must go. The sight of him in that turn-out has settled the business for me. Only yesterday, when Corporal Kempfer asked him what he was going to be when he grew up, he said, 'A légionnaire.'"

Jacques laughed bitterly, as though reviewing mentally the légion of lost men to which he belonged, the regiment so glorious in the eyes of the child. Ah! if Ivan could have seen his regiment of heroes with the eyes of Jacques! and yet, who can say which were the clearer eyes, the eyes of the child or the eyes of the man?

El Kobir put down his cigarette on the little ash-tray by his elbow, and turned from the rug he was engaged in doctoring.

"Why must the child go?" said he.

Jacques grumbled in his throat for a moment, then he burst out, "I don't know what ails me or why I should make fantasie over the business. Do I want to get rid of the child? I've got fond of that child. He's got sense in his head, more sense than a battalion of numskull légionnaires. Now, when I don't want to do a thing, nobody can make me do it. I don't speak of regimental orders, but in ordinary things I say that when I don't want to do a thing nobody can make me do it. I don't want to get rid of the child; why then do I say he must go? I cannot tell you that.

"Now, listen! when Karasloff was dying, he said to me, 'I leave you Ivan to send back to my people. He will take his own place among them when I am dead. They do not know where he is. I took him away because he was the only thing I cared for, you must return him to my people when I am dead.' Karasloff has been dead five months," finished Jacques.

El Kobir was silent for a moment, then he spoke:

"But how are you to know where to send him?"

"Oh, mon Dieu, how? Karasloff gave me the address of his people just before he died, and I promised to write to them."

"That was five months ago," said El Kobir.

"Yes, five months ago. I did not want to send the child off, and so I have played false with Karasloff for five months."

"Not so," replied El Kobir, "you only delayed in performing a promise, you did not break it."

"Oh, as for that," said Jacques, "I said to myself when he was dead that I would keep the child, promise or no promise; then, lately it came to me that a child has no say, he just has to take his marching orders, and I fell to wondering if I was marching him into a ditch; just now when he came in wearing that rig-out, it was as if the uniform hit me in the face. No, he has to go back to his own people."

Jacques knew the word "Duty" only as a military term. He could not tell in the least what power it was that compelled him to do this thing he did not want to do. The child had become a companion, an interest, almost a necessity of life, and had you told him that it was the good influence of the child upon him that was now driving the child away from him, he would not have understood you.

No. The uniform had hit him in the face, that was enough for him.

El Kobir said nothing more. Like Jacques, he did not want to part with the child, yet he was a just man. Had he been an unjust man or a hard-hearted man, he would not have wanted to keep the child. Our good qualities hit us very hard sometimes.

"And who are the child's people?" asked El Kobir, as Jacques, rose to go.

The latter took a paper from his pocket and handed it to his questioner, who scanned it and handed it back without a word.

It was almost a world-known name that he had read, and it remained before his eyes as he sat alone working on the rug.

He knew quite well that Jacques was about to write, or get his commanding officer to write to the child's people, yet he had said nothing to urge or deter him from that course.

He was an old man, and the child had grown round his heart. However, Fate is Fate. If the thing had to be, it had to be. All the same, a half welcome idea clung to his mind that Jacques might prove weak enough to let the matter stand as it was for the present. A year or two, what did it matter. And suppose the child were taken off to that splendid palace and that glorious future awaiting him, might that prove the happiest fate for him?

El Kobir had a profound knowledge of the evil of wealth and the weariness of greatness, and he looked on Western civilization with the cynical eyes of an Eastern.

Railway trains, telegraph lines, steamships, the magic that makes a voice reach London from Paris, all these things did not impress him at all; viewed against the background of the stately East they seemed like the vulgar jewellery of a nouveau riche. He knew quite well that the glitter surrounding a great man in Europe was only glitter, and that as far as happiness was concerned, an Arab boy playing in the streets of Sidi-bel-Abbès had, perhaps, a better chance of securing happiness than a princeling in a palace of the West.

Still, the child was a European—and Fate was Fate.

Days passed and nothing happened. Jacques came of an evening as usual, but not a word did he say on the all important topic, nor did the old man speak of it.

He watched Jacques narrowly, but that personage showed nothing of his mind or his intentions. He seemed a bit grimmer than usual, except when Ivan was present, but one could argue nothing much from that. The grimness might be simply the expression of dissatisfaction with himself for having done nothing to further the orders of the dead Karasloff.

However, a week later the bomb-shell fell. Quite early in the afternoon Jacques made his appearance at El Kobir's.

"They have come for the child," said he.

The old man, who was looking over some accounts, glanced up.

"Ah, they have come for the child. Where are they?"

"At the Hôtel d'Oran. They wanted to come here and fetch him. I told them not. I told them I would fetch him myself. You see we don't want a fuss—you had better say nothing to the child. I will just take him for a walk and leave him with them at the hotel. They seem good folk these people of his. There is a woman and a man, the grandfather and grandmother it seems. There is also our Colonel at the hotel with all the papers about Karasloff.

"The grandfather is M. le Prince, but he is all the same a kind-spoken old man—the child will be happy enough. Besides, he need not know he is going away for always. Only there must be no fuss. He does not want to take any clothes with him or luggage—they will give him all that."

El Kobir called his servant to bring Ivan.

"Ivan," said El Kobir, "your friend has come to take you for a walk."

He took the child to his side for a moment and gave him a little squeeze, then he kissed him on the forehead.

Ivan clapped his hand in that of Jacques, and the pair went off, while El Kobir returned to his accounts.

But the addition of figures made little way, and the eternal cigarette was unlit as he sat thinking, thinking, a hundred miles removed from the shop, from his business, from himself.

He was an old man and he had lost many friends. His business was indeed the only friend left to him. Jacques had never been his friend.

Just an acquaintance. They were people inhabiting different worlds, with ideas, tastes, and natures absolutely dissimilar. Ivan by his magic had drawn them together, but he had not united them.

Indeed, now that Ivan was gone, El Kobir felt a vague antagonism towards Jacques.

Jacques had divided them. This rascal of a Jacques had done a fine thing no doubt in parting with the child he was so fond of, for the child's sake—all the same, he had taken the child away.

It was after dark and the swaying lamp was lit in the shop when Jacques came back.

"Well," he said, "it's done, and they leave to-morrow for Oran. They made me stay for a while and talk——"

"And the child?" asked El Kobir.

"The child's as pleased as they are. He ran into the old woman's arms directly they met, and called her grandmama. He does not know he's going away for good—anyway, there he is quite happy. Happier than I've ever seen him."

El Kobir heaved a sigh. Then he went off into the back premises and returned with a bundle. It was the uniform of the Corporal of the légionnaires, little képi and all.

"These are yours," said he, "you had better take them back to the man who made them. Your Legion is a légionnaire the less now."

Jacques unrolled the things, looked at the blue coat and red trousers, the sash and the belt, then as we close the pages of a story, he folded them together, put them under his arm, and with the képi swinging by the chin-strap to his finger, bade good-night to the old man and went off to the barracks.

MANSOOR

They were coming back from the rifle butts in the blaze of the late afternoon sun, Jacques walking beside Corporal Kandorff. The roofs and minarets of Sidi-bel-Abbès showed beyond the barracks, swimming in the heat-shaken air, whilst on the tepid wind blowing in their faces came the scents of the desert and the smell of the town.

You can smell Sidi-bel-Abbès half a league off, the perfume of the yellow city is as distinctive as the perfume of a marigold, and as unforgettable. Camels, negroes, jasmine flowers, caporal tobacco and the old, old yellow earth of the ramparts all lend a trace of themselves to form a scent the very recollection of which brings up the bugles of the Legion, the domes of the city, and the cry of the muezzins from the minarets of the mosques.

Jacques was thirsty, and as he tramped along beside Kandorff he was abusive towards the universe in general. When he was short of money he was always like that, and lately he had been very short of money, reduced to borrowing a few halfpence that morning from Kandorff—fifteen centimes, and they were spent.

"Seven years in the regiment," he was saying, "and look at me. I who know every hole and corner of Sidi-bel-Abbès. Things are going from bad to worse; a year ago there was lots of pickings to be had what between the new drafts from Oran and the town there; but of late there's not a man joined the Legion with more than the rags he stands up in, and as for the town it's gone rotten. Visitors don't seem to come there now, there's no money and no tick and no trade to be done. I was the sharpest man in the regiment once at carving a bit out of the Arabs and the visitors and the traders, but where's the use in being sharp when you have nothing to cut. Tell me that. I had money once, enough to start in business when I got my discharge; much good my discharge will do me when I get it. It will mean rejoining for another five years, and that will be the end of me. I want the sight of money and I want it bad; every time I pass the Crédit Lyonnais I can scent the gold there just as you smell the cooking going on in a café. I'll break in there some day, and if I can't do anything more I'll just roll in the twenty-franc pieces, swallow them, choke myself with them. That's how I feel—you'll see."

"Then they would shoot you," said Kandorff, "and I would never get my fifteen centimes back."

Jacques laughed.

"Well, there would be some satisfaction in that," said he. "It's better to die owing fifteen centimes than owing nothing—one has someone to mourn one then. Ah, ha! here's the placard for Mansoor stuck up."

They had reached the barrack gates and he pointed to a poster just stuck upon the right gate-post. It was the offer of a reward of five hundred francs for the capture of Mansoor, late superintendent of the Arab police, and the delivery of his body alive or dead into the hands of Colonel Tirard, chief of the regiment of légionnaires stationed at Sidi-bel-Abbès. The poster was issued from the Bureau Arabe, but the goods were to be delivered at the headquarters of the Legion.

Mansoor, two days ago, had murdered a légionnaire; it was a sordid and ferocious crime, committed on account of a woman. The criminal had made his escape, Sidi-bel-Abbès had been searched, Oran sealed, and the desert posts warned, but the murderer was still at large, hence the reward. Jacques and Kandorff stood amongst the crowd that had gathered to discuss the notice.

"They'll never get him," said Kandorff.

"And why not?" asked one of the crowd.

"Why not? Well, just for the very good reason that he is an Arab and the Arab police will shelter him and wink at his escape."

"Winking at him won't help him much if he wants to cross the frontier," replied the other, "to get into Tunisia."

"He won't bother about that," said Kandorff; "he'll stick on to some wandering tribe and most likely the next time we meet him he'll be fighting us down south somewhere. That is the sort of man worse to let loose than a plague, and he will very likely raise a holy war of his own if he is not caught."

Kandorff—whose name was not Kandorff and who had spent some years in the Asiatic Department of the Russian Foreign Office—was a man who knew what he was talking about. He turned and entered the barrack yard with Jacques and the business passed from their minds. A légionnaire has no time to bother about murders, even if the murdered man is a légionnaire. Jacques and his companion had not even time to think about resting. They had their washing to do.

Jacques had annexed a piece of soap that morning and hidden it under his bed; he shared it now with Kandorff as they stood at the great washing trough, and then, the uniforms washed, pressed and packed safely away, they started off on their usual evening's walk to the town.

Arrived there they parted company, Kandorff going on some business of his own, whilst Jacques, left to himself, strolled off down one of the boulevards. The evening was delightful after the heat of the day, and the wind from the desert, warm but stimulating, played with the leaves of the trees bordering the street and blew in the face of the légionnaire as he walked, glancing in at the shop windows and pausing here and there to inspect their contents.

He reached the Crédit Lyonnais, which was closed, and stood for a moment looking at the building as though measuring the strength of it. This was the place where fellows shovelled twenty-franc pieces across the counter with copper shovels and pulled out drawers stuffed with pink and blue five-hundred-franc notes. Dreams rose before him of what the Legion could do if it only had the courage of its desires and opinions. The looting of Sidi-bel-Abbès rose up before him, a gaudy picture with himself in the foreground armed with a copper shovel and a sack. Then he resumed his way, striking from the boulevard into the native quarter, or rather the Moslem quarter of the town.

He was quite at home here and well known to many of the traders. He had eaten kouss-kouss in the terrible little native cafés where the front premises are only the stage curtains that conceal an opium joint or worse; he was known to black-eyed Arab children and to the quick-eyed Arab police, and to-night, being hard up for cigarettes, he was on the look-out for someone amidst all this host of acquaintances who could supply him.

In a narrow street and before an open booth he paused. Here on a bench beneath a swinging lamp sat a yellow man, cross-legged and wearing a red fez. He was rolling cigarettes.

He had rolled cigarettes since the time when he was a little boy, son of a cigarette-maker in Blidah. He would continue rolling cigarettes till they took him to the grave. He did not know how many he had rolled since his fingers had first closed on the rice paper and the yellow opium-tinctured tobacco. He might have rolled millions, tens of millions, he did not know. He never smoked the things he rolled and one might have taken him for an automaton, but for the song that was always humming upon his lips, a song without words, monotonous, dreary and fateful.

Jacques paused before this image and greeted it. It nodded in reply to his greeting and went on with its work.

Jahāl, for that was the name of this man, did not work for his own hand. He was only a servant in the employ of the Kassim company. It supplied him with the tobacco and cigarette-papers and paid him for the finished product. He sat now without replying to the remarks of the légionnaire, for he guessed Jacques was hard up for a smoke and had come to borrow.

Jacques noted the sullenness of the other and resented it. He was just on the point of flinging an epigram at the head of the silent one and turning on his heel, when the reed curtain at the back of the shop parted, revealing the head of Mansoor the murderer.

There was no mistaking that dark haughty head with the hare lip that exposed glistening teeth in an eternal sneer.

The pause in the talk between Jacques and Jahāl had evidently inspired Mansoor with the belief that the visitor was gone, and, as evidently, he had something urgent to say to Jahāl, else he would not have put forth from his hiding hole. As it was he drew back instantly, but not before Jacques had sprung into the shop, upsetting Jahāl, sending the pile of made cigarettes flying every way and striking with his head the swinging lamp so that it smashed against the fretwork screen depending from the low ceiling and went out.

Next moment, Jacques was behind the screen, in darkness, struggling with a cloth which someone—he knew it was a woman from the clash of the bangles on the arms—had flung over him. Then he was free and bursting out of a stifling atmosphere of camel-hair cloth, scent, and native smell through a window and with his right hand on the shoulder of Mansoor.

Mansoor had sprung into a lane through a window. The moon, filling with light as the west sank to darkness, shone on the scene and showed now the flying figure of Mansoor and the following figure of Jacques, who had missed the shoulder hold, fallen face forward from the low window on to the pavement, and, nothing daunted by his fall, was in full pursuit.

Jacques had joined in many a game of life and death, but never one quite like this. There was money in this business, a lot of money, and fame. More fame than he could ever get were he to perform the utmost prodigies of valour as a soldier fighting the enemy with his regiment.

Then Mansoor was a devil incarnate and he was absolutely certain to be armed. He had not fired yet, nor would he do so as long as there was the faintest chance of escape without using the automatic pistol in his belt.

He, Jacques, was unarmed.

All these considerations, flashing and splashing like heliograph signals across the brain of Jacques, tinged the business with the charm of drunkenness. This was Life stirred up and sublimated, the sort of life one holds for a moment by virtue of Absinthe.

With the rush of a rat, Mansoor broke from the lane into a passage that was simply a crack between two houses that were built right against the inner wall of the ramparts.

The house next the rampart had an iron stair leading to the upper story and the roof. Mansoor, followed by Jacques, swarmed up these stairs, reached the roof, reached the ramparts and dropped over into the encircling ditch.

Mansoor made the drop fifteen seconds only before Jacques. It was thirty feet and they ought both to have been killed, but we may fancy that the gods like a bit of sport sometimes, for they weren't.

But the Arab recovered from the shake-up of the fall before his pursuer had done likewise, and from the start at the ditch's edge for the race for freedom Jacques was under a half-minute handicap.

Half a minute is a terribly long time when the energy of life is blazing to a point as in battle, or a pursuit like this. It gave Mansoor time to get well away.

Just here, around the walls of Sidi-bel-Abbès, you will find vineyards stretching southward and breaking up at last into market gardens. Mansoor was making his way between two vineyards down a path that ended in a cul-de-sac.

A fence, in fact, ended the path and barred his way and checked it for a moment. He left it broken behind him and struck across a market garden where long lines of bell glasses glowed in the light of the moon. In the grape season all this place would be watched by the grape growers and by this a hue and cry might have been set up and half a dozen unsolicited helpers spoiling Jacques' game, but at this time of year the place was deserted and the pursued and the pursuer had the ground to themselves.

The time taken by Mansoor in breaking through the fence gave Jacques an advantage, for the break was so thorough that he was able to get through without delay; when he was through, Mansoor, at the other end of the garden, was negotiating the fence on that side.

Beyond lay broken ground, spotted here and there with stunted bushes and cacti.

When Jacques reached this place, Mansoor was far ahead but distinctly visible, and he had altered his pace. He was no longer running as if for his life, he had settled down to a jog-trot, and Jacques, after a spurt that lessened the distance between them by a quarter, held himself in and settled down to the pace of Mansoor.

The man who holds the lead in an affair of this kind holds the advantage, for the pursuer, if he overhauls the pursued, must inevitably come up to the scratch winded.

Jacques had come to the conclusion that the murderer was unarmed, else here, in this desolate place, he would undoubtedly have attacked instead of running away. Believing this, he determined to hang on the other's heels, wear him down, and then close with him.

He knew his own powers; a born long-distance runner and trained to feats of almost fabulous endurance by his seven years' life in the Legion, he felt that he held the trump card, and if, as he felt certain now, Mansoor was unarmed, he had no fear of the issue.

Sidi-bel-Abbès is situated on the borders of the desert, but the Algerian desert must not be confused with the Sahara, in those places where it shows limitless wastes of sand.

The desert places of Algeria show little sand except in districts away down south, as, for instance, by the Oasis of the Five Palms or that great, sandy track where we saw the Legion fronting the Arabs and defeating them.

The desert of Algeria consists of waste land, rock-strewn and desolate, yellow earth, sun-baked and hardened, a few miserable scrub bushes and cacti, an occasional oasis with palm trees blowing in the desert wind.

There is no water, except that which flows underground and breaks to the surface here and there to form the oasis pools.

Through this wilderness runs the great southern military road, built by the soldiers of the Legion, and the line Mansoor was now taking lay to the west of this road. It was his object to avoid the road; in this Jacques was with him; the road meant military patrols and the prize taken out of Jacques' hands.

Five hundred francs! Never for a moment had the idea left his mind; it had driven him like a charging bull into the shop of the cigarette-maker, it led him in pursuit down the lane, over the rampart, into the ditch and through the market garden; it was leading him now on the most desperate and dangerous chase that man ever engaged in, and it would lead him to the end, whatever the end might be.

The serious fact for Mansoor at that moment lay, not in the fact that he was a murderer, but the fact that he was five hundred francs. He was bundles of Algerian cigarettes, bottles of blue Algerian wine, jolly evenings at the canteen, lots of soap to wash uniforms with, kisses from black-eyed girls, glasses of coloured liqueurs at Kito's—and he was being chased by Jacques!—heaven help him!

The half-moon blazing in the sky lit the chase, and the cold of the Algerian night checked the breath of Jacques.

It seemed also to affect Mansoor, for all of a sudden he slackened his pace from a jog-trot to a quick walk.

His pursuer did the same, nothing loth.

At this pace, the marching pace of the Legion, he could keep on all night and half the next day.

In the Legion on a route march he would be carrying rifle, three hundred rounds of ammunition, knapsack and tent-pole, a weight of fifty kilogrammes or so. To-night he was free of all this, his own man.

As he kept up the pursuit the thought suddenly occurred to him that the barracks would have long closed by this, and not answering to the roll call his name would be posted as a deserter. This thought amused him for a moment, then it troubled him. He had deserted from the regiment before; that always leaves a stain on a man's name, no matter how good his subsequent conduct may be. The punishment for a second attempt is very heavy and the Legion is deaf to excuses and very merciless. Stung by this, he determined to finish the business at once, if possible, close with his prey and chance it. He broke into a run, but, lo and behold, as though gifted with eyes in the back of his head, or a supernatural sense of hearing, Mansoor did likewise.

Five minutes later, both men, as if by tacit consent, had fallen back into the old pace.

There are occasions when men hold quite long conversations with one another without a word of speech, and whilst they are grasping for one another's throats. Mansoor was saying to Jacques, "If you increase your pace I will increase mine; there is nothing to be gained by you in overhauling me like that; quite the reverse, for, seeing that I have a long lead, you would be the most exhausted of the two if you managed to outstrip me. Besides, in a racing test you might not be able to do so."

Jacques was saying, "That is true—curse you!—well, then, let's heel and toe it, I have the advantage of the practice marches of the Legion on my side, and I can stick to you till we both drop. I know, you have method in your game, for the further you lead me the more chance you have of falling in with some tribe of wandering Arabs who would back you against me. Well, I must take the chance."

These two men had once known each other; at a distance, it is true, still they had known one another and exchanged greetings. Jacques had a reputation of his own in Sidi-bel-Abbès, and so had Mansoor. They knew one another's reputations. This knowledge helped in the mute conversation between the pursued and the pursuer.

At dawn they had put some thirty kilometres between them and Sidi-bel-Abbès; the outline of the Tessala Mountains hardened against the fading darkness and then the sun rose, a ball of guinea-gold coloured, eye-dazzling fire, in a blue, still, silent sky.

The solitude here was unbroken by any sign of life; grass patch, scrub bush, ash-grey-green cactus, all seemed petrified in their natural colours, unreal in the real and living sunlight. Forsaken, and given over to eternal silence.

Jacques, used as he was to extreme and violent exercise, was beginning to fail. On route marches, it is true, he had often done forty kilometres heavily laden. They were not yet forty kilometres from their starting-point, and he was carrying nothing, but it must be remembered that the Legion on the march pauses often for a rest and that five minutes' rest makes all the difference.

Jacques had not had a moment's rest. The same held true for Mansoor. Both men were exhausted, but they were exhibiting the effects of their exhaustion in different ways. Jacques, marching well and firmly, had the appearance of a man still capable of covering many miles. His legs were still all right, but his head was giving out. The higher nervous centres could not hold to their work much longer, and that is one of the most fatal forms of exhaustion. For half a minute at a time he would forget Mansoor. At any moment he might fall together like a house of cards and lie on the ground, not dead, but sleeping peacefully, a prey to the man he was pursuing.

On the other hand, Mansoor was failing in the legs; occasionally he swayed and stumbled, but his mind was clear and it dominated his body, as a jockey dominates an exhausted horse.

They had entered a little gully where years ago quarrying work had gone on, for stone to metal the great south road, and Jacques' mind had just returned from one of its momentary lapses, when he saw the man he was pursuing wheel round and advance towards him.

Mansoor was holding something in his right hand. It was an automatic pistol.

It was the sight of the pistol that brought Jacques' mind vividly awake. A pistol! And he had been absolutely certain that his enemy was unarmed. The fact remained, and before the fact Jacques turned tail. But he did not run.

On his left a cave-opening in the rock caught his eye, and urged by the dread of a bullet in his back he dived into the cave.

Mansoor, pistol in hand, came along, swaying as he came, wild-eyed and dreadful, with the grey pallor of exhaustion showing through his dusky skin.

Right opposite the cave mouth, and thirty feet or so away, he flung himself down on the ground, rested his left arm on a piece of rock and the barrel of the pistol on the angle of his elbow, taking aim straight into the cave.

Jacques, seeing this, flung himself flat on the cave floor and waited for the first shot.

But Mansoor did not fire. He seemed content to lie recovering from his exhaustion and holding his enemy at bay.

Jacques had retreated as far as possible into the darkness of the cave, the opening was some nine feet or so from his face, and as he lay on his stomach, his chin resting on his arm, the fact that he was cornered and at the mercy of the other appeared before him in all its bleak simplicity.

Mansoor, when he had rested sufficiently and gauged the possibilities of the situation, would come straight to the cave mouth and then all would be over with Jacques.

But the man with the pistol showed no signs of such an intention yet, he seemed content to wait and watch, keeping a strict blockade till his energy and resolution found themselves again.

Jacques wondered what it would be like when he was dead and lying there always in the cave. Mansoor would not bother to bury him. He thought of what his companions in the Legion would say and think. They would fancy that he had deserted and had succeeded in making his escape. Then appeared before him the blue sea at Oran and Oran itself, with the barracks away up on the heights just as he had seen it on the first day of his arrival in Algeria, more than seven years ago. Then the sea, from a thought, became a vision and shimmered up to him and over him. Mansoor vanished, the cave, the sunlight at its door and the fact that he was held for Death.

Jacques had fallen asleep.

Had you fired a cannon in the ravine he would not have heard it. It was the sleep that follows on high excitement or profound exhaustion.

He was awakened by the bugles of the Legion sounding the réveillé, so it seemed to him for a moment, then the bugles of the Legion became the crying of birds.

Birds were flocking about the ravine, great birds whose shadows swept the ground in front of the cave. With the return of consciousness to Jacques came the return of full mental energy. He remembered everything, and recognized to his astonishment that it was evening, towards sundown, and that Mansoor was still in exactly the same position, his face half sheltered by his arm, taking aim.

Yet it was morning when Jacques had fallen asleep. All the burning day the murderer must have lain like this, watching—or had sleep taken him too?

Suddenly one of the great birds whose shadows had been flitting across the ground swept down and lighted on the head of Mansoor. It stood there for a second, fiery-eyed and swaying, like a funeral plume, then, shooting its head forward and downward, it peeped up into the face of the watching one and plucked out an eye.

The birds of the desert always attack the eyes of a man first. The vultures will haul at a fallen man's head till they get the face sideways. Jacques, who knew all about the birds of the desert and their ways, gave a shout; next moment he was kneeling beside the dead man.

Mansoor had been dead for hours, death had struck him most likely the moment he had changed the upright for the recumbent position, giving him only just time to lie down and take aim. His heart had given out owing to his exertions and the excitement of the chase, or a blood vessel had broken in his brain.

Jacques took the pistol from the dead hand, not without a struggle. Then he saw why the pursued man had not fired on him. The magazine was empty.

Mansoor must have been unable to obtain ammunition after the murder. He had used bluff. It is almost as good sometimes.

The birds had now drawn off. They could be seen perched here and there on the rocks and waddling on the ground. Jacques shook his fist at them. Then, taking a clasp knife out of his pocket, a knife as keen as a razor, he did that unto the body of Mansoor which would ensure the reward of five hundred francs.

As he stood up the sun was setting, and the half-moon, like a ghost in the east, was strengthening in outline. From that eastern sky, warm blue and infinite in depth, a gentle wind was blowing, shaking the leaves of the few stunted plants that grew in the ravine.

Jacques, having finished his business, came out of the ravine and stood shading his eyes with his hands.

The land far and wide lay glowing in the sunset light, all hardness had vanished from it, and the desolation was almost masked by the colours that spread the distance.

The légionnaire was looking now to the east. He had determined to make for the great south road and strike along it back to Sidi-bel-Abbès. He was stiff and so exhausted from want of food that he could take little pleasure in his triumph and the prospect of the reward.

His one idea was rest and food and drink. As he tramped along, making due east, he found by good chance one of those tiny oases which occur here and there in this part of the Algerian desert. Here, by a well scarcely bigger than a slop basin, grew a prickly pear bush with ripe fruit on it. He drank from the well and cut some of the pears, taking care to avoid the prickles, then, having smoked a pipe, he started again by the light of the moon, which was now burning white and clear.

By the well he had heard the far-off crying and quarrelling of the birds from the ravine; he could hear it still as he walked, the sound growing ever fainter, till it ceased altogether before he struck the road just at the milestone that marked the forty-first kilometre from Sidi-bel-Abbès.

Here he was lucky enough to fall in with a cart going in the direction of the town, and obtained a lift to the rest-house, which lay five miles ahead and where for a couple of francs, which he had taken from the pocket of Mansoor, he obtained a bed for the night and some food.

At four o'clock the next afternoon, Jacques, in the highest of spirits, dusty and tired, yet stepping out vigorously, saw the roofs and mosque minarets of Sidi-bel-Abbès breaking up before him against the sky.

He was going to enter that town as a conqueror. He gloated over the idea. What a good joke! His name by this had without doubt been posted as the name of a deserter, the Legion would be speculating on his escape, they would see him returning, jeer over the fact—and then!

Besides, what a smack it would be at the Arab police. The police and the légionnaires are not friends. The police have the power to arrest an escaped légionnaire, and more than that, they receive a reward for his capture. You can fancy, then, how sharp they were on the look-out for prey of this sort, and the ill-feeling that results.

Jacques, trudging along, had quite forgotten the police, also the fact that he had no doubt been posted as a deserter by this. All of a sudden the sound of horse-hoofs on the road behind him made him turn his head. Two horsemen were approaching at full speed. They had been scouting amongst the broken ground on the eastern side of the road, and the dusty figure of the légionnaire tramping along had attracted their attention.

They overhauled him, recognized him at once as the man for whom a reward was out, and whilst one of them held him under the muzzle of a pistol, the other clapped a handcuff on his right wrist. The handcuff was attached to a couple of fathoms of thin steel chain, and next moment they were mounted and trotting for Sidi-bel-Abbès, Jacques running behind them in the dust of the road.

A nice triumphal entry for a corporal of the Legion.

They passed the gates, and then down the main boulevard they came, the infernal police, like boys returning from fishing, only too proud to exhibit their catch.

They were bringing him through the town on purpose. He knew it, but he did not care. He was promising himself a fine revenge, and the onlookers in the street were treated to a new sight, an escaped légionnaire being brought in bursting with laughter and shouting ribald remarks to his captors.

At the barracks the police dismounted, and leaving their horses in charge of one of the légionnaires on duty, they marched their still laughing prisoner off to the guard-room, Five minutes later they were standing before Colonel Tirard, waiting for their reward, Jacques between them.

The Colonel was in a temper. Jacques was one of the best men in the regiment, and one of the best marchers. He had been well treated. Desertion on the part of a man like that was a big crime in his eyes.

"So, you scamp," said he, "they've brought you back. A nice thing truly, for you, a man in authority over others. Well, I will teach you—what's in that bundle tied to your belt?"

"A present for you, mon Colonel," replied Jacques.

He took the bundle, which consisted of something wrapped up in the dead man's shirt, placed it on the table, opened it, and exposed the grinning head of Mansoor.

"There are things that explain themselves," said Jacques that night, as he told the story of his interview with Colonel Tirard to his companions.

He spent the money in diverse ways, but he bought no cigarettes. Jahāl supplied him with cigarettes gratis during the next three months. He had said nothing about Jahāl's part in the business of hiding Mansoor, and he managed to impress Jahāl with the importance of his silence and its commercial value. That was Jacques all over.

THE BIRD CAGE

I

Jacques was a bird fancier.

The slums of London and Paris seem to breed bird fanciers, men who supply the trade, and just amateurs, market porters, artisans and so forth, who go bird-catching outside the city limits of a Sunday, or who content themselves with buying the feathered article in the rough state and training it for profit.

Jacques in his Paris days used to do this occasionally by way of an honest occupation, and now, in Algeria, a corporal in the second regiment of the Foreign Legion, he managed to turn an honest penny sometimes at the bird-fancying business. A Spanish Jew with an unpronounceable name was his partner, Arab boys did the trapping, and Jacques found many a customer for the little red, soft-throated African birds amongst the officers of the Legion and their friends.

It was in this way I met him first.

One Sunday I came across him on the ramparts of Sidi-bel-Abbès.

He had come there to meet someone in connection with the bird business, and as the someone had not yet turned up, we sat and talked. He told me this story, or, at least, he gave me the substance of the story I am going to tell you.

The Legion recruits its units mostly from the failures and broken-down men of the world; consequently, and leaving aside young criminals who are driven into it by the law, it numbers few very young men in its ranks.

Raboustel formed an exception to this rule.

He was quite young, not more than eighteen or so, a fine fellow in every way, but unfit for the life he had chosen. He was a rebel, at least against discipline and restraint.

He had joined the Legion expecting, no doubt, an adventurous life hunting down Arabs or fighting pitched battles with the tribes; he did not enjoy the reality, eternal drill, with road-making, route-marching, and odd jobs as the only alternatives.

However, he possessed considerable force of character and power of restraint over himself, and after the first month or so settled down—or seemed to.

He had no special chum, but he was popular in his way and friendly with Jacques. He told the latter his history—how he had been brought up to do as he liked by a mother who doted on him, how his mother had died, and his father, a vine-grower near Avignon, had tried to make him work; how he had rebelled, not against work, but against the monotony of regular labour, how a man in the cavalry had told him of the glorious times to be had in the Legion, and how he had enlisted.

"Glorious times, truly," said Jacques as he was telling me this, "up at daybreak, to bed at dark, drill, Swedish exercises, route-marching, firing-range—the life of a camel and a halfpenny a day."

However that might be, Raboustel took his gruel, to use the expression of Jacques, and didn't grumble over the taste of it. A bad sign. Everyone grumbles in the Legion, and naturally, for the man who has sold his body and soul for a halfpenny a day feels that he has something to grumble at. The silent men and the men who keep up an appearance of unnatural cheerfulness are the men likely to make trouble.

For the first couple of months, then, Raboustel, loathing the life that had seized upon him, but saying nothing or next to nothing about his feelings on the matter, seemed on the highway to one of the hundred forms of revolt common to légionnaires.

Any day Jacques would not have been surprised to hear that Raboustel had mutilated himself, or made an attempt to escape, or committed some act equally mad and equally sure to lead to punishment or death.

But time went on and nothing happened, and then, strange to say, Raboustel, so far from trying to run away or attempting some mad act, all at once became cheerful—really and unfeignedly cheerful—and began to grumble at the small pin-pricks of an Algerian soldier's life just like a healthy légionnaire. He had fallen in love.

One evening, passing through Kassim Street, in the native quarter of the town, he had stopped to admire the brass-work exposed for sale in a little shop near the corner where Kassim Street is cut by the Street of the Crescent. The owner of the shop, a Spanish Jew, Abraham Misas by name, was not there. His daughter was looking after the place in his absence.

She was lying crouched on a rug in the dark interior of the shop, and seeing what she supposed to be a customer looking at the wares, she came forward.

A girl of sixteen or so, slight, dark, and beautiful as a dream.

When she saw that the customer was a légionnaire she was about to turn away in disdain. Légionnaires never buy things, and consequently are looked upon as scarcely human beings by the trading population of Sidi-bel-Abbès.

However, before she had time to turn Raboustel spoke to her; there was something in his voice that pleased her, and in a couple of minutes they were chatting away one to the other quite amicably across the brassware, so that a passer-by might have fancied them old acquaintances. They interested one another immensely and at once, and their talk about nothing in particular, the weather, the doings of the town and the Legion, had for each of them the charm of a new and surprising adventure. She spoke French with a Spanish accent. She asked him how long he had been with the Legion, and how he liked the life, and in a moment he found himself telling her all about himself, where he had come from and how he had joined the regiment for the sake of a more active and interesting life than the life of a vine-grower.

He had arrived at this when suddenly the girl broke off the conversation, and an old man, looking something like Svengali grown grey, passed Raboustel and entered the shop.

Raboustel, with a glance at the girl, turned and went on his way. He was very quick in the up-take, knew at once that the old man was the proprietor of the place and almost exactly what his feelings would be to find his daughter chatting to one of those penniless, good-for-nothing scamps of the Legion.

He returned to barracks that night a changed man. He was not in love, but the fact that someone had taken an interest in his affairs warmed his heart, and then there was something in the knowledge that the person who had taken interest in his poor affairs was a woman. Added to this, the picture of the girl remained with him so vividly that it was the first thing he saw on opening his eyes next morning. Love ought really to be represented as a photographer. He does all his business by distributing pictures to his clients, fatal pictures that they can't dispose of, or tear up, or destroy.

On parade Raboustel was looking at the girl's picture whilst receiving orders, and it came between him and the target on the range that afternoon. It filled him in the evening with such a burning desire to look at the original that he walked down Kassim Street, only to be rewarded by the sight of her father. The old man was sitting in the half-gloom of the shop, smoking cigarettes and waiting for customers, and you may be sure that Raboustel as he passed did nothing to attract his attention.

The next day the same thing happened, but on the third evening, as luck would have it, the old man was away on some business and Manuella, that was her name, was in the shop.

She came forward smiling and they talked together as before. Love grows quickly in Algeria, especially when he is pressed for time, and before they parted that night there was an understanding between these two, and Raboustel returned to barracks in such a high state of spirits that his companions fancied he had been drinking.

Now nothing much more disastrous can happen to a légionnaire than to fall in love. It is not a common complaint amongst légionnaires; they have little time or inclination for the business, and if they had who would look at them or listen to them? A halfpenny a day, a position a little above that of a convict—nice prospects to lay at the feet of any girl.

Nothing more hopeless than this passion of Raboustel could be well imagined, yet he never thought of that, and she never thought of it either. They were in love one with the other, that was the only thing they thought of. But the Legion was not to be denied or flouted. It had its revenge on this man who dared to think of other things than the bitterness of life, who dared to catch the white bird Love and hold it clasped to the tunic of a légionnaire.

It hit him first in the pocket. Out of a halfpenny a day you cannot save much to buy presents with, and the first instinct of a man in love is to offer a present to the woman he loves.

Jacques at that time was carrying on a small traffic in birds, it was a business he took up and dropped with the seasons, and as it happened to be then the full swing of the season he was fairly occupied in his leisure hours buying and trapping birds.

One day near the barracks he met Raboustel, noted that he was dejected and out of sorts and asked the reason.

"It is nothing," said Raboustel.

"I know that nothing," replied the other. "I have suffered from it myself. Come, out with it, is it the food that's making you sick?"

"I have nothing to say against the food."

"Ah, then it's just the barracks, I know that feeling."

"I have nothing to say against the barracks."

"You haven't!" cried Jacques, with a burst of laughter. "Then you must be singularly easy to please. Ah, I know, you are homesick."

Raboustel laughed.

"I have not thought of home for a week. No, you are wrong, Corporal, it is neither the food, nor the barracks, nor the thought of home that is troubling me, it is something else."

He told his position in a few words. He had come to care for a girl and he had no money with which to buy her a present, nothing to offer her.

Jacques listened. At the word "girl" he had been on the point of laughing, then he saw in a flash that this was a serious business for Raboustel.

The position of a man in the Legion is such that honest aspirations and ambitions are absurd, unless they be purely military, and even then they are rarely fulfilled, and as for love!

Jacques whistled when the other told him all.

"You will have trouble there," said he. "You will have the old man on top of you; does he know about it?"

"Not he," said Raboustel.

"Well, he is sure to get to know, and then your trouble will begin. You see, you are a légionnaire."

"Well, what of that?"

"What of that! Nom de Dieu! You wouldn't be asking 'what of that' if you had a daughter in love with a légionnaire. You would be getting out a gun and shooting him. Well, the thing is not to be helped. It is a matter accomplished. When a man makes a fool of himself there is only one thing to be said for the situation, it is a matter accomplished. When do you see her?"

"In the evenings sometimes."

"Where?"

"Well," said Raboustel, "I saw her the first few times in the shop of her father, lately she has come to speak to me at the corner of the Grand Boulevard where it cuts the Street of the Crescent. She meets me there and we talk. Sometimes we walk a bit in the Boulevard and she looks into the shop windows, not wanting me to buy her things, you understand, but still, there you are. I couldn't if I wanted to—that's what's troubling me. I want to."

"And you can't. Well, we must see what can be done," replied Jacques. "I was in your position once, when I first joined. I hadn't been a week in the Legion when I lost my head over a girl, she was a daughter of a fruit-seller who used to peddle oranges on the Place Sadi Carnot. Abarbanell was his name, he was the colour of an old service boot, and she was the prettiest girl in Sidi—so I thought. I had a few francs left over from the money I had brought into the service, and I bought her some beads, amber beads made of glass. I went to give them to her and I found her arm in arm with a Spahi. She laughed at the beads, so did the Spahi; well, he did not laugh when I was trying to make him swallow them. He on the pavement and I on the top of him. They took him off to the hospital and I got ten days' cells, and when I came out, Abarbanell had been shot out of Algeria for selling drink without a permit and his daughter shot after him for robbing the men he made drunk. Well, let's see, maybe I can help you to get something to give this girl of yours. Times are not good; no, indeed. They could not be pretty much worse. Still, there are ways. I'll think it over."

He did, and two days later he called Raboustel into the cook-shop of the Legion, where there was no one except the cook, a solemn-faced German, engaged in cutting up the meat for the evening soupe.

"Here is what I have got you," said Jacques.

He went to the corner of the place and produced something wrapped up in a cloth. It was a tiny cage, and in the cage were two little birds.

"It's the best I can do," said Jacques, "and they are worth five francs in the market. It's a cock and a hen, and here's a bag of bird seed, the stuff they're used to, that and a drop of water is all they want—she'll know."

Raboustel was delighted. He could not express his thanks. Five francs was an impossible sum for him just then, and if he had possessed it he could not have spent it on a prettier present than the birds.

Manuella was not the girl to appreciate cheap jewellery.

That evening he was to meet her on the ramparts, and at sunset there he was true to time, and he had scarcely been waiting five minutes when she appeared, dressed as he had never seen her before, with a lace mantilla covering her shapely head.

It was a lonely spot that they had chosen, giving a view over the country towards the west.

When he took the covering off the cage and showed her the present he had brought for her she clasped her hands together.

Then she took the little cage between her two palms and kissed the bars of it, just as she had kissed her lover on the lips a moment before.

It was a pretty picture, there in the last rays of the sunset, a scrub stone pine, growing from a piece of rock in the rampart, shivering above her in the wind of the desert, the hot, dry wind puffing up from the sou'-sou'-west, the wind that brings with it the flavour of the heart of Africa from those great spaces across which are written desolation—death.

She held the little cage in her hands all the time they were together. It was their first time of being absolutely alone one with another. Several times when he tried to take her in his arms he found the little cage between himself and her. He could not injure the birds, so he released her.

II

One evening she came to meet him late for the rendezvous, and creeping through the darkness like a shadow.

It was just before the new moon, and the stars had the sky all to themselves, a sky of black pansy-purple, luminous, leaping with life and light and fire.

Up here, where they met, the murmur of the city came to them from below; the faint music of a band, louder or lower as the wind took it or left it, the murmur of the streets, shrill boy voices calling the last edition of the Echo d'Oran.

She had brought bad news.

Her father had discovered everything. It had all come about through the little birds. Someone must have seen her receiving them, and then, they were not a present that one could keep hidden for long.

She kept them in her room, but their little soft voices chatting together must have reached the old man. Sounds like that were just the sounds to reach a person like Abraham Misas. He would have heard through walls of triple brass and by instinct. Then when she was out he would have poked his head into her room and seen the cage and its contents. He would then have cast about to find the giver.

Or it may have been that someone just came into the shop and said to him, "I have seen your daughter with a soldier, one of the légionnaires."

However that might be, the fact remained. Abraham Misas had a brother, a metal worker in Algiers, and on the day after the morrow he was going to Algiers and taking Manuella with him. She was to live with the brother and help him in his shop.

Abraham had said not one word to his daughter of the reason for the change, he had made no reproach. That was the sort of man he was, secretive, silent, always working underground to obtain his ends and always obtaining them.

To a callous outsider this decision of the old man, taking all the facts into consideration, was a piece of profound common sense. For even had Raboustel been an eligible party he was tied to the Legion for nearly five years more.

Had Raboustel been worth a million of money he could not have escaped the Legion's clutches. No man once seized by that iron grip can ever escape, be he prince or millionaire or pauper, till the expiration of his term of service sets him free.

So to an outsider the decision of the old Jew would have seemed reasonable enough. To the two lovers it was equivalent to a sentence of death.

Raboustel, confused by the blow and able to see nothing clearly, on parting with the girl that night made her promise to meet him at the same place on the morrow and at the same time.

"I will think it over," said he, "but one thing you may be sure, you will not go. We will find some means of stopping it."

"We can always die," said Manuella.

He went tearing back to barracks and found Jacques, who had just returned. He told him the whole story outside the canteen, and Jacques gave him very cold comfort.

"What can you do?" said he. "The old man takes her off to Algiers, that is to say to the moon as far as you are concerned. You can't follow them, for to do so would be to desert, and you would be caught at the first station out from Sidi. Even if you could follow them, what then? You would find yourself in Algiers with no money. You cannot carry on War or Love without money. That is a fact. You cannot run away with her. Where could you run to? Nom du bon Dieu, listen to me. It is I, Jacques, that am talking, and I know what I am talking about. A man, if he is very quick-witted, if he has plenty of money, if he can talk two languages, and if he is an expert at disguise, may succeed in escaping as far as Oran. If he is under special convoy by order of good luck he may reach Marseilles, and if he escapes the military police at Marseilles, who have eyes back and front and at the ends of their fingers, he may get out of France. Now, mark you, it's not a question of escaping from Sidi-bel-Abbès or Algeria, it is a question of escaping from France.

"You, without money, without languages, without the art of disguise and with a girl in tow—what can you do? See you, if you get even to Marseilles it would not help, for there is a telegraph cable under the sea, and telegrams go quicker than mail boats, and once the girl is missed you'd have all the Jews in Algeria shouting that a Christian had run off with Rebecca, and all the Jews in Marseilles would meet you at the landing-stage. That is another point. You are not of the same faith. You are a Christian."

"Oh, mon Dieu!" said Raboustel, "what has Faith to do with love?"

"You would soon know if you went after a Mohammedan girl and her people caught you," replied Jacques. "No, you are outflanked everywhere, you can do nothing."

"One can always die," said Raboustel, echoing Manuella.

"This is a fool's talk," replied the other; "any fool can die. Come, I will stand you a bottle. There's more sense in a bottle than in many a man's skull. Come, I'll pay."

But Raboustel was not in the humour for drink, and said so and departed on his way.

He went to bed, but he did not sleep that night. He lay awake, listening to the snoring of the others, and their muttered conversation sometimes as they talked aloud in their sleep.

Légionnaires sleep soundly, but they sometimes have dreams that even the soundest sleep cannot smother. Dreams of France, of England, of the wastes of Russia, of days departed and faces never to be seen again.

Raboustel, lying on his back, watched the night pass and the stars moving across the blue-black luminous sky disclosed by the window space opposite to him.

Then something brilliant came slowly sailing into view, it was the crescent of the new moon.

The new moon is the most lovely of new-born things, especially when seen in the night sky of Algeria. Raboustel watched it pass, scarcely heeding it. He was thinking out a plan.

Next day at six o'clock he departed as usual with the others to the town.

Jacques, who had kept his eye on him all day, walked with him as far as the town and then left him. Jacques, who had a good deal of wisdom of his own, did not refer to the subject of the girl. He judged that if Raboustel had made up his mind to run away with her, nothing would stop him from making the attempt, and he considered that if Raboustel had given up the idea it would be an unfriendly thing to make him talk of it. Jacques was a good deal of a gentleman, though he had knifed several men in his time.

When he returned to barracks that night he looked about for his friend. He had not yet come back. Then Jacques, instead of going to the canteen, took his place near the sentry at the barrack gate and watched the late arrivals coming in. The men came in twos and threes, singing, skylarking, some silent and moody, the last of them flushed with running, but none of them drunk. Drunkenness is not common in the Legion, owing to the scarcity of money and the drastic nature of the punishment.

Then the barrack gates were shut and the roll was called. Raboustel did not answer to his name.

He had deserted.

Of course it might be that he would yet turn up. It sometimes happens that a légionnaire, for one cause or another, outstays his leave; but Jacques did not consider this chance at all. He made up his mind that the man had deserted, and he was right.

Next day brought confirmation.

A report came from the Arab police that a légionnaire and a girl mounted on a presumably stolen horse had been met with by a police patrol on the southern road.

The girl was mounted behind the légionnaire. The patrol, consisting of two officers, allowed them to pass; they were riding at full speed and the officers never thought for a moment that it was the case of a légionnaire deserting. Légionnaires making off are always on foot, they avoid the high roads and they don't carry girls with them.

Then, recovering from their surprise, the police officers consulted together and determined to follow, but the légionnaire had got a long start and a very good horse. They followed for two miles or so without gaining on the suspects, their horses being poor and already tired by a long day's work. They dropped the chase, returned to Sidi-bel-Abbès and telegraphed to the nearest southern police post.

No news of the supposed fugitives had been received. They must have left the road and taken to the plain.

Then Abraham Misas appeared on the scene. He turned up at the barracks, interviewed the colonel and literally wailed over his lost daughter. It was a bad quarter of an hour for Colonel Tirard, and he swore terrible oaths as to what he would do with that scamp of a Raboustel when he was brought back. He got rid of the old man at last, and day followed day, but no news came, and week followed week without a breath or word from that mysterious south into which the lovers had vanished like figures in a dream.

The affair caused a great stir in Sidi-bel-Abbès, where it is remembered yet. The escape of a soldier would not give the good people of the town a moment's thought, but the escape of a soldier taking away with him a girl of the town, a daughter of an honest citizen, made them furious.

This delighted the Legion, who hate the townsfolk for various and substantial reasons. Raboustel became a hero. He had undoubtedly made his way across the frontier into Morocco. The thing had been done once or twice before by deserters.

After a month had passed this supposition became an assured fact and Raboustel began to suffer the fate of the heroes, kings and captains who had vanished. People began to forget him.

"And you never saw him again?" I said.

"There you are wrong, Monsieur," replied Jacques. "I saw them both. It was this way. Three months or so after he had made his escape, taking the girl with him, an Arab tribe down south began to light matches. That sort of thing spreads and must be put out quickly, or you would soon have the whole of the south on fire, so, one night we got our orders to march. The whole regiment went.

"It was really not much of an affair and we soon dealt with it; what made us swear was not the fighting, for there was scarcely enough fighting to go round, but the distance. The place was very far south, in the region of the sand dunes.

"Does Monsieur know the desert? Many people when they talk of the desert think of sand and nothing but sand, whereas the desert is rock and nothing but rock, till, of course, you reach the sandy patches.

"Well, it was down there, the main fighting was over and we were sending out patrol parties to clean up and hunt for fugitives. I was with one of these parties. One day, about ten kilometres from camp, we sighted a palm tree, and knowing there was water there, we made for it, thinking also to find fugitives.

"It was a dead tree, Monsieur; it had been dead, maybe, six months, and the well source that had fed it was dried up, but we found fugitives.

"Under the withered tree, Monsieur, lay two skeletons, the bones all mixed together, and some rags of cloth; the birds had torn the clothing to get at the bodies that now were skeletons.

"There were also some buttons from a légionnaire's uniform, his belt and buckle, and a woman's comb. I said at once: 'There's Raboustel and his girl, look,' I said; 'it is a légionnaire's bones, and the little bones are those of a girl.'

"Then, Monsieur, I picked up something else that made me sure. It was a little cage. I knew it, for I had made it myself, and in the cage there were also two skeletons. The girl had taken the thing with her. Women do strange things. One might have thought that she had enough to bother about, without taking that. It was a strong cage, made of iron wire, else the vultures would have broken it to pieces. That is the story of Raboustel, Monsieur, and his girl."

He rolled a cigarette, and as he was lighting it there came along the person for whom he was waiting. An Arab boy, a bird trapper, carrying a cage in which were two little birds newly caught. He gave them to Jacques, who gave him in return some small coins.

"Do you make much at this business?" I asked.

"No, Monsieur," he replied. "A légionnaire never has the chance of making much money over anything. Just a few francs, and the man who buys them will sell them for ten—he is not in the Legion."

I gave him ten francs for the birds, and opening the cage let them free, much to his amazement; then we stood watching them as they fluttered in the air, confused, dazzled by freedom, and at last striking south away across the vineyards like two spirits freed from the prison of a sordid and soul-ruining world.

THE SON OF CHOC

One day in times away back before Jacques had joined the Legion, Count Aerenthal, that well-groomed diplomat, sitting in his private room at the Bal Platz in Vienna, and in conference with parties not wholly un-German, came to a grave decision, a decision to tear up the Treaty of Berlin and rob Serbia of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

That decision, ratified by the God of Rogues, had very far-reaching consequences. It was the match that set a light to a long, long train of consequences. It was the voice that found echoes in every pocket of the Balkan mountains and an answer to-day in the blaring bugles of the Foreign Legion.

ACTIVE SERVICE

Fancy the magic of those words in that vast sun-baked barrack of the Legion, those words that cut through the routine of life like a sword. Drills, Swedish exercises, road-mending, the awful blaze of the Algerian mid-summer, all collapsed, broke away, vanished like the memory of a nightmare before the vision of war.

Not a rough and tumble Arab war, either, but a great German war, made in Berlin, polished and complete in all its parts, an affair "worth something."

There were men in the Legion well versed in the intricacies of European diplomacy; there were men in the Legion better fitted to write the history of what we call Armageddon than many a European scribe renowned in his trade. But from the lowliest to the likeliest, there was not a man who thought or cared for anything but the fight ahead.

For the Legion does not care what it fights so long as it fights, where it goes so long as it goes, or how far it goes so long as it gets clear of barracks.

The Germans in the Legion were quite ready to fight Germany, the Spaniards to fight Spain, the Austrians to fight Austria; but, and this is the mysterious thing, they were all eager to fight for France.

For France who paid them a halfpenny a day and worked them like horses, yet who had, by some alchemy, made them her loyal soldiers second to none in the field.

Some days later at Oran, whilst they were waiting to embark, Jacques and a companion, having obtained leave of absence from barracks, were taking a stroll through the town.

Jacques had only been here once since that day, years ago, when, having parted with Casmir and Choc, he had been arrested and taken back to Sidi-bel-Abbès. The place was just the same, the same sun-splashed streets, Arabs, Jews, Levantines, Greeks, the same salt sea wind blowing round corners and wiping out the same Oriental smells, the same children playing in the gutter, the same beggars and plum-coloured porters topped with red fezes, the same Spahis smoking the same cigarettes.

Then, turning a corner they came on a crowd and a dog fight.

An awful Arab brute was engaged in a battle to the death with a dust-coloured mongrel, and the mongrel was Choc.

No, it could not be Choc, for it had a white patch on its rump, but save for that patch it was Choc, and Jacques seized his companion by the arm as he stood watching, breathless, without a word.

Now the dust-coloured one was down, now up, and now, marked by a shout from Jacques, it had got the old hold. Clinging to the Arab's foreleg just where it joined the body, it clung luxuriously, whilst the Mohammedan yelled and circled, demoralized, beaten and craving to run.

"Watch!" cried Jacques.

The word had scarcely left his lips, when releasing the leg hold, the dusty devil had the other by the throat.

That was Choc's old trick; a fatal one for next minute the Arab was dead.

Then the dusty one sat down by the corpse and laughed, with tongue hanging out and head wagging to the panting of the body.

Blood was flowing from him in three places, but he did not even bother to lick the wounds. He was "celebrating."

Then as the crowd dispersed he got up stiffly, snuffed the corpse, shook himself, snuffed his wounds, and went off to a shady corner to apply first dressings and laze on his side, and think the battle over.

Jacques approached him, only to be received by a growl. The same old attitude of mind towards strangers after battle that Jacques knew so well.

Jacques nodded at the dog, then, taking his companion by the arm, he walked off. He was elated. He had seen Choc's offspring, and as he walked he poured out his mind. Told all the old story we know and then finished up: "Well it's good to know the dog came through it, and had heart enough to have a son, maybe that's a grandson, I don't know, but it's Choc's right enough, son or grandson. Oh, if I know anything of Choc, he'll have filled Oran with his pups—but it's good to know he had a bit of pleasure in life and heart to take it. Let us have a drink on it."

They went into a café. "Yes, I feel just, as you may say, 'sif I'd found a child I'd lost, and it's a good omen. You mark me, we'll beat the Boches just like that, we'll get the leg hold and then the throat. I know. The old dog has come to tell me."