Corporal Jacques of the Foreign Legion

by H. De Vere Stacpoole

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.