Cigarette always went fast. She had a bird-like way of skimming her ground that took her over it with wonderful swiftness; all the tassels, and ribbon knots, and sashes with which her uniform was rendered so gay and so distinctive fluttering behind her; and her little military boots, with the bright spurs twinkling, flying over the earth too lightly for a speck of dust,—though it lay thick as August suns could parch it,—to rest upon her. Thus she went now, along the lovely moonlight; singing her drinking song so fast and so loud that, had it been any other than this young fire-eater of the African squadrons, it might have been supposed she sang out of fear and bravado—two things, however, that never touched Cigarette; for she exulted in danger as friskily as a young salmon exults in the first, crisp, tumbling crest of a sea-wave, and would have backed up the most vainglorious word she could have spoken with the cost of her life, had need been. Suddenly, as she went, she heard a shout on the still night air—very still, now that the lights, and the melodies, and the laughter of Chateauroy's villa lay far behind, and the town of Algiers was yet distant, with its lamps glittering down by the sea.
The shout was, “A moi, Roumis! Pour la France!” And Cigarette knew the voice, ringing melodiously and calm still, though it gave the sound of alarm.
“Cigarette au secour!” she cried in answer; she had cried it many a time over the heat of battlefields, and when the wounded men in the dead of the sickly night writhed under the knife of the camp-thieves. If she had gone like the wind before, she went like the lightning now.
A few yards onward she saw a confused knot of horses and of riders struggling one with another in a cloud of white dust, silvery and hazy in the radiance of the moon.
The center figure was Cecil's; the four others were Arabs, armed to the teeth and mad with drink, who had spent the whole day in drunken debauchery; pouring in raki down their throats until they were wild with its poisonous fire, and had darted headlong, all abreast, down out of the town; overriding all that came in their way, and lashing their poor beasts with their sabers till the horses' flanks ran blood. Just as they neared Cecil they had knocked aside and trampled over a worn out old colon, of age too feeble for him to totter in time from their path. Cecil had reined up and shouted to them to pause; they, inflamed with the perilous drink, and senseless with the fury which seems to possess every Arab once started in a race neck-to-neck, were too blind to see, and too furious to care, that they were faced by a soldier of France, but rode down on him at once, with their curled sabers flashing round their heads. His horse stood the shock gallantly, and he sought at first only to parry their thrusts and to cut through their stallions' reins; but the latter were chain bridles, and only notched his sword as the blade struck them, and the former became too numerous and too savagely dealt to be easily played with in carte and tierce. The Arabs were dead-drunk, he saw at a glance, and had got the blood-thirst upon them; roused and burning with brandy and raki, these men were like tigers to deal with; the words he had spoken they never heard, and their horses hemmed him in powerless, while their steel flashed on every side—they were not of the tribe of Khalifa.
If he struck not, and struck not surely, he saw that a few moments more of that moonlight night were all that he would live. He wished to avoid bloodshed, both because his sympathies were always with the conquered tribes, and because he knew that every one of these quarrels and combats between the vanquisher and the vanquished served further to widen the breach, already broad enough, between them. But it was no longer a matter of choice with him, as his shoulder was grazed by a thrust which, but for a swerve of his horse, would have pierced to his lungs; and the four riders, yelling like madmen, forced the animal back on his haunches, and assaulted him with breathless violence. He swept his own arm back, and brought his saber down straight through the sword-arm of the foremost; the limb was cleft through as if the stroke of an ax had severed it, and, thrice infuriated, the Arabs closed in on him. The points of their weapons were piercing his harness when, sharp and swift, one on another, three shots hissed past him; the nearest of his assailants fell stone dead, and the others, wounded and startled, loosed their hold, shook their reins, and tore off down the lonely road, while the dead man's horse, shaking his burden from him out of the stirrups, followed them at a headlong gallop through a cloud of dust.
“That was a pretty cut through the arm; better had it been through the throat. Never do things by halves, ami Victor,” said Cigarette carelessly, as she thrust her pistols back into her sash, and looked, with the tranquil appreciation of a connoisseur, on the brown, brawny, naked limb, where it lay severed on the sand, with the hilt of the weapon still hanging in the sinewy fingers. Cecil threw himself from his saddle and gazed at her in bewildered amazement; he had thought those sure, cool, death-dealing shots had come from some Spahi or Chasseur.
“I owe you my life!” he said rapidly. “But—good God!—you have shot the fellow dead——”
Cigarette shrugged her shoulders with a contemptuous glance at the Bedouin's corpse.
“To be sure—I am not a bungler.”