"You've come to the right place for it then," observed Legionary John Bull, sheathing his bayonet with a snap, as the door banged open.... "Ah! Enter our friend Luigi," he added as that worthy swaggered into the room with an obsequious retinue, which included le bon Légionnaire Edouard Malvin, looking very smart and dapper in the uniform of Légionnaire Alphonse Dupont of the Eleventh Company.
"Pah! I smell 'blues'! Disgusting! Sickening!" ejaculated Légionnaire Luigi Rivoli in a tremendous voice, and stood staring menacingly from recruit to recruit.
Reginald Rupert, returning his hot, insolent glare with a cold and steady stare, beheld a huge and powerful-looking man with a pale, cruel face, coarsely handsome, wherein the bold, heavily lashed black eyes were set too close together beneath their broad, black, knitted brows, and the little carefully curled black moustache, beneath the little plebeian nose, hid nothing of the over-ripe red lips of an over-small mouth.
"Corpo di Bacco!" he roared in Italian and Legion French. "The place reeks of the stinking 'blues.' Were it not that I now go en ville to dine and drink my Chianti wine (none of your filthy Algerian slops for Luigi Rivoli), and to smoke my sigaro estero at my café, I would fling them all down three flights of stairs," and, like his companions, he commenced stripping off his white uniform. Having bared his truly magnificent arms and chest, he struck an attitude, ostentatiously contracted his huge right biceps, and smote it a resounding smack with the palm of his left hand.
"Aha!" he roared, as all turned to look at him.
"Disgustin' bounder," remarked Reginald Rupert very distinctly, as, with a second shout of "Aha!" Rivoli did the same with the left biceps and right hand, and then bunched the vast pectoralis major muscles of his chest.
"Magnifique:" cried Légionnaire Edouard Malvin, who was laying out his patron's uniform from his paquetage, preparatory to helping him to dress.
"As thou sayest, my gallo, 'C'est magnifique,'" replied Luigi Rivoli, and for five minutes contracted, flexed, and slapped the great muscles of his arms, shoulders, and chest.
"Come hither--thou little bambino Malvin, thou Bad Wine, thou Cattevo Vino Francese, and stand behind me.... What of the back? Canst thou see the 'bull's head' as I set the trapezius, rhomboideus, and latissimus dorsi muscles?"
"As clearly as I see your own head, Main de Fer," replied the Austrian in affected astonishment and wonder. "It is the World's Most Wonderful Back! Why, were Maxick and Saldo, Hackenschmidt, the three Saxons, Sandow--yea--Samson and Hercules themselves here, all would be humiliated and envious."