"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