Chapter 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."

And maybe he had.

THE END