THE COLONEL'S SENTENCE: AN ALGERIAN STORY.

"I've known many clever fellows in my time," said Paul Dupont, French sous-lieutenant in the —th of the line, as he sat sipping his coffee in front of the Hôtel de la Régence at Algiers, "but by far the cleverest man I ever met was our old colonel, Henri de Malet. People said he ought to have been an avocat, but that was giving him but half his due, for I'll be bound he could have outflanked any lawyer that ever wore a gown. In his latter days he always went by the name of 'Solomon the Second;' and if you care to hear how he came by it I'll tell you.

"Before he came to us De Malet was military commandant at Oran, and it was there that he did one of his best strokes—outgeneralling a camel-driver from Tangier, one of those thorough-paced Moorish rascals of whom the saying goes, 'Two Maltese to a Jew, and three Jews to a Moor,' Now this Tangerine, when pulled up for some offence or other, swore that he wasn't Muley the camel-driver at all, but quite another man; and as his friends all swore the same, and he had managed to alter his appearance a bit before he was arrested, he seemed safe to get off. But our colonel wasn't to be done in that way. He pretended to dismiss the case, and allowed the fellow to get right out into the street as if all was over; and then he suddenly shouted after him, 'Muley the camel-driver, I want to speak to you.' The old rogue, hearing his own name, turned and came back before he could recollect himself; and so he was caught in spite of all his cunning.

"The fame of this exploit went abroad like wildfire, and it got to be a saying among us, whenever we heard of any very clever trick, that it was 'one of Colonel de Malet's judgments;' and so, when he was transferred from Oran to Algiers, it was just as if we all knew him already, although none of us had ever seen him before. But it wasn't long before we got a much better story than that about him; for one night a man dined at our mess who had known the colonel out in India, and told us a grand tale of how he had astonished them all at Pondicherry. It seems that some things had been stolen from the officers' quarters, and nobody could tell who had done it. The first thing next morning the colonel went along the line at early parade, giving each of the native soldiers a small strip of bamboo; and then he said, very solemnly, 'My children, there is a guilty man among us, and it has been revealed to me by Brahma himself how his guilt is to be made clear. Let every man of you come forward in his turn and give me his piece of bamboo; and the thief, let him do what he may, will have the longest piece.'

"Now, you know what superstitious hounds those Asiatic fellows always are; and when they heard this announcement they all looked at each other like children going to be whipped. The colonel took the bamboos one after another, as solemnly as if he were on a court-martial, but when about a dozen men had gone past he suddenly sprang forward and seized one of them by the throat, shouting at the full pitch of his voice, 'You are the man!'

"Down went the fellow on his knees and yelled for mercy, confessing that he was the man, sure enough. As for the rest, they looked as frightened as if all the gods in the caverns of Elephanta had come flying down among them at once; and from that day forth they salaamed to the very ground at the mere sight of the colonel half a mile off.

"'How on earth did you manage that, colonel?' asked the senior major, a great fat fellow, as stupid as a carp.[7]

"'Nothing simpler, my dear fellow,' answered De Malet, laughing. 'The strips were all exactly the same length, and the thief, fearing to get the longest piece, betrayed himself by biting off the end.'

"This, as you may think, added a good deal to the colonel's reputation; and when we had that affair with the Bedouins at Laghouat we soon saw that he could fight as well as manoeuvre. In the thick of the skirmish one of the rogues, seeing De Malet left alone, flew at him with drawn yataghan, but the colonel just dropped on his horse's neck and let the blow pass over him, and then gave point and ran the fellow right through the body, as neatly as any fencing-master could have done it. You may be sure we thought none the less of him after that; but all this was nothing to what was coming.

"Well, De Malet had been with us about a year when the railway was begun from Algiers to Blidah, and the directing engineer happened to be one of my greatest friends, Eugène Latour, as good a fellow as I ever met. It was quite a fête with us whenever he dined at mess, for his jokes and good stories kept every one brisk; and then to hear him sing! ma foi, it was wonderful! One minute some rattling refrain that seemed to set the very chairs dancing, and then suddenly a low, sad air that fairly brought the tears into your eyes. They were in mine, I know, every time I heard him sing those last two verses of 'The Conscript's Farewell:'

I thought to gain rich spoils—I've gained Of bullets half a score: I thought to come back corporal— I shall come back no more. Feed my poor dog, I pray thee, Rose, And with him gentle be: He'll miss his master for a while— Adieu! remember me![8]

"Well, as I was saying, Eugène had been put over the work, and I don't know where they could have found a better man for it. Whether it poured with rain or came on hot enough to cook a cutlet without fire, it was all one to him: there he was at his post, looking after everything, with his eyes in ten places at once. You may think that under such a chief the laborers had no chance of idling; and everything was getting on splendidly when one morning, as he was standing on the parapet of a bridge, his foot slipped and down he went, I don't know how far. The fall would have killed him outright if by good luck there hadn't happened to be an Arab underneath (the only time that an Arab ever was of any use, I should say), and Eugène, alighting upon him, broke his own fall and the Bedouin's neck to boot.

"Now, if there had been nobody there to tell tales, this wouldn't have mattered a pin, for an Arab more or less is no such great matter; but, as ill-luck would have it, there were three or four more of the rascals near enough to see what had happened, and of course they raised a hue-and-cry directly. And when it was noised abroad that a Christian dog (as they politely call us) had killed a Mussulman, you should have seen what an uproar there was! The people came running together like vultures when a camel drops down in the desert, and there was a yelling and dancing and shaking of fists that made one's very head turn round. Poor Eugène would have been torn to pieces on the spot if the guard hadn't formed round him and defended him; and the only way we could pacify the mob was to promise them justice from the district magistrate; so away to the magistrate we all went.

"Now, I dare say Mr. Magistrate was a very good fellow in his way, and I don't want to say a word against him, but still, it must be owned that he wasn't exactly the kind of man to stand firm in the midst of a rabble of wild Mohammedans, all howling and flourishing their knives at once under his very nose. To tell the plain truth, he was frightened out of his wits; and the only thing he thought of was how to shift the responsibility on to somebody else's shoulders as fast as possible. So he said (and it was very lucky he did, as it turned out) that Latour, being in government employ, must be tried by military law; and he packed them all off to the commandant, who, as I've told you, was no other than Colonel de Malet.

"It was no easy matter for the colonel to get at the facts of the case, for all the rascals kept shrieking at once, one louder than another; but at last, bit by bit, he managed to get a pretty clear idea of what had happened; and then he said, very solemnly, 'A French officer does his duty, let it be what it will. You have come here for justice, and justice you shall have.'

"There was a great roar of triumph from the crowd, and poor Eugène looked as blank as a thief in the Salle de la Police.

"'Before I pass sentence, however,' pursued De Malet, 'I wish to ask this young man' (pointing to the son of the dead Arab, who was the ringleader of all the mischief) 'whether he will accept of any compromise.'

"'No, no!' yelled the young brigand—'life for life!'

"'So be it,' said the colonel gravely, 'and you, by Mussulman law, are your father's destined avenger. Therefore, let the engineer be taken back to the very spot where his victim was standing, and do you go up to the top of the parapet and jump down upon him!'

"Tonnerre de ciel! what a roar of laughter there was! The very Arabs couldn't help joining in. As to the young villain himself, he stood stock-still for a moment, and then flew out of the court like a madman; and that was the last of him. We gave Eugène a famous supper that night at the Café Militaire in honor of his escape; and the story was in all the papers next morning, headed 'A Judgment of Solomon.' And from that day to the end of his life Colonel de Malet never went by any other name among us but 'Solomon the Second.'"

David Ker.