They asked her where she went; she never answered. The hoofs struck sharp echoes out of the rugged stones, and the people were scattered like chaff as she went at full gallop down through Algiers. Her comrades, used to see her ever with some song in the air and some laugh on the lips as she went, looked after her with wonder as she passed them, silent, and with her face white and stern as though the bright, brown loveliness of it had been changed to alabaster.
“What is it with the Cigarette?” they asked each other. None could tell; the desert horse and his rider flew by them as a swallow flies. The gleam of her Cross and the colorless calm of the childlike face that wore the resolve of a Napoleon's on it were the last they ever saw of Cigarette.
All her fluent, untiring speech was gone—gone with the rose hue from her cheek, with the laugh from her mouth, with the child's joyance from her heart; but the brave, stanch, dauntless spirit lived with a soldier's courage, with a martyr's patience.
And she rode straight through the scorch of the midday sun, along the sea-coast westward. The dizzy swiftness would have blinded most who should have been carried through the dry air and under the burning skies at that breathless and pauseless speed; but she had ridden half-maddened colts with the skill of Arabs themselves; she had been tossed on a holster from her earliest years, and had clung with an infant's hands in fearless glee to the mane of roughriders' chargers. She never swerved, she never sickened; she was borne on and on against the hard, hot currents of the cleft air with only one sense—that she went so slowly, so slowly, when with every beat of the ringing hoofs one of the few moments of a charmed life fled away!
She had a long route before her; she had many leagues to travel, and there were but four-and-twenty hours, she knew well, left to the man who was condemned to death. Four-and-twenty hours left open for appeal—no more—betwixt the delivery and execution of the sentence. That delay was always interpreted by the French Code as a delay extending from the evening of the day to the dawn of the second day following; and some slight interval might then ensue, according as the general in command ordained. But the twenty-four hours was all of which she could be certain; and even of them some must have flown by since the carrier-pigeon had been loosed to her. She could not tell how long he had to live.
There were fifty miles between her and her goal; Abd-el-Kader's horse had once covered that space in three hours, so men of the Army of D'Aumale had told her; she knew what they had done she could do. Once only she paused, to let her horse lie a brief while, and cool his foam-flecked sides, and crop some short, sweet grass that grew where a cleft of water ran and made the bare earth green. She sat quite motionless while he rested; she was keenly alive to all that could best save his strength and further her travel; but she watched him during those few minutes of rest and inaction with a fearful look of hunger in her eyes—the worst hunger—that which craves Time and cannot seize it fast enough. Then she mounted again, and again went on, on her flight.
She swept by cantonments, villages, soldiers on the march, douairs of peaceful Arabs, strings of mules and camels, caravans of merchandise; nothing arrested her; she saw nothing that she passed, as she rode over the hard, dust-covered, shadowless roads; over the weary, sun-scorched, monotonous country; over the land without verdure and without foliage, the land that yet has so weird a beauty, so irresistible a fascination; the land to which men, knowing that death waits for them in it, yet return with as mad an infatuation as her lovers went back across the waters to Circe.
The horse was reeking with smoke and foam, and the blood was coursing from his flanks, as she reached her destination at last, and threw herself off his saddle as he sank, faint and quivering, to the ground. Whither she had come was to a fortress where the Marshal of France, who was the Viceroy of Africa, had arrived that day in his progress of inspection throughout the provinces. Soldiers clustered round her eagerly beneath the gates and over the fallen beast; a thousand questions pouring from their curious tongues. She pointed to the animal with one hand, to the gaunt pile of stone that bristled with cannon with the other.
“Have a care of him; and lead me to the chief.”
She spoke quietly; but a certain sensation of awe and fear moved those who heard. She was not the Child of the Army whom they knew so well. She was a creature, desperate, hard-pressed, mute as death, strong as steel; above all, hunted by despair.