"Courage, my dear," she implored, "we will telegraph at once to the minister of war for news."
The girl drew a convulsive breath and turned, and leaning both elbows on the piano keys—perhaps in the very notes whose music in the little song had charmed Sabron—she burst into tears. The marquise rose and passed out of the room to send a man with a despatch to Tarascon.
CHAPTER XIII
ONE DOG'S DAY
There must be a real philosophy in all proverbs. "Every dog has his day" is a significant one. It surely was for Pitchouné. He had his day. It was a glorious one, a terrible one, a memorable one, and he played his little part in it. He awoke at the gray dawn, springing like a flash from the foot of Sabron's bed, where he lay asleep, in response to the sound of the reveille, and Sabron sprang up after him.
Pitchouné in a few moments was in the center of real disorder. All he knew was that he followed his master all day long. The dog's knowledge did not comprehend the fact that not only had the native village, of which his master spoke in his letter to Miss Redmond, been destroyed, but that Sabron's regiment itself was menaced by a concerted and concentrated attack from an entire tribe, led by a fanatic as hotminded and as fierce as the Mahdi of Sudanese history.
Pitchouné followed at the heels of his master's horse. No one paid any attention to him. Heaven knows why he was not trampled to death, but he was not. No one trod on him; no horse's hoof hit his little wiry form that managed in the midst of carnage and death to keep itself secure and his hide whole. He smelt the gunpowder, he smelt the smoke, sniffed at it, threw up his pretty head and barked, puffed and panted, yelped and tore about and followed. He was not conscious of anything but that Sabron was in motion; that Sabron, his beloved master, was in action of some kind or other and he, a soldier's dog, was in action, too. He howled at fierce dark faces, when he saw them. He snarled at the bullets that whistled around his ears and, laying his little ears back, he shook his black muzzle in the very grin of death.
Sabron's horse was shot under him, and then Pitchouné saw his master, sprang upon him, and his feelings were not hurt that no attention was paid him, that not even his name was called, and as Sabron struggled on, Pitchouné followed. It was his day; he was fighting the natives; he was part of a battle; he was a soldier's dog! Little by little the creatures and things around him grew fewer, the smoke cleared and rolled away, there were a few feet of freedom around him in which he stood and barked; then he was off again close to his master's heels and not too soon. He did not know the blow that struck Sabron, but he saw him fall, and then there came into his canine heart some knowledge of the importance of his day. He had raced himself weary. Every bone in his little body ached with fatigue.
Sabron lay his length on the bed of a dried-up river, one of those phantom-like channels of a desert stream whose course runs watery only certain times of the year. Sabron, wounded in the abdomen, lay on his side. Pitchouné smelled him from head to foot, addressed himself to his restoration in his own way. He licked his face and hands and ears, sat sentinel at the beloved head where the forehead was covered with sweat and blood. He barked feverishly and to his attentive ears there came no answer whatsoever, either from the wounded man in the bed of the African river or from the silent plains.
Sabron was deserted. He had fallen and not been missed and his regiment, routed by the Arabs, had been driven into retreat. Finally the little dog, who knew by instinct that life remained in his master's body, set himself at work vigorously to awaken a sign of life. He attacked Sabron's shoulder as though it were a prey; he worried him, barked in his ear, struck him lightly with his paw, and finally, awakening to dreadful pain, to fever and to isolation, awakening perhaps to the battle for life, to the attentions of his friend, the spahi opened his eyes.