Part 8

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