Then Zeiss vanished round a corner and Jacques returned to the barracks.
He wanted to be alone, a most dangerous sign in a man of Jacques' mentality and character. He knew that at this hour the barracks would be empty of all but the sentries and the men under sentence of confinement to barracks, and he found no one in the big bedroom where he slept and where now he lay down on his bed to think.
He was thinking of how he should kill Zeiss.
All sorts of tempting ways occurred to him and were played with by his mind, but they had all one fault—they would also inevitably kill Jacques.
He was a very brave man, but he had no fancy at all for facing the firing-squad.
His love for Mimi was not of the nature that makes a man regardless of all things should he be betrayed, but it was strong enough to raise the Apache in him.
His dreams of wealth and motor-cars had been smashed by this scoundrel Zeiss; that fact was almost more powerful with him than the fact that Zeiss had stolen Mimi from him, and more potent than either of these was the fact that Zeiss, his friend, had betrayed him.
Twenty minutes passed and then Jacques, rising from his bed, went off downstairs to the canteen. He had discovered a way to revenge himself, clean and without danger.
Firing practice on the range took place once every three weeks or so, and Jacques had to wait a week till one fine morning when, led by the buglers, his company started out for the butts.
During the whole of that week he had not seen Mimi nor heard from her, nor thought of her, so deeply was his mind engaged with Zeiss. But out here on the firing-ground this blazing morning, just as he had taken a loaded rifle from one of the new recruits to explain its mechanism, the thought of Mimi shot up in his mind like an imp as if to give energy to his purpose.