He strolled as far as the corral down in the meadow by the stream, where he found the negro muleteers asleep and the mules already watered and fed.
For a while he hobnobbed with the three gendarmes on duty there, practicing his kind of French on them and managing to understand and be understood more or less—probably less.
But the young man was persistent; he desired to become that easy master of the French language that his tongue-tied com[pg 175]rades believed him to be. So he practiced garrulously upon the polite, suffering gendarmes.
He related to them his experience on shipboard with a thousand mutinous mules to pacify, feed, water, and otherwise cherish. They had, it appeared, encountered no submarines, but enjoyed several alarms from destroyers which eventually proved to be British.
"A cousin of mine," explained Burley, "Ned Winters, of El Paso, went down on the steamer John B. Doty, with eleven hundred mules and six niggers. The Boches torpedoed the ship and then raked the boats. I'd like to get a crack at one Boche before I go back to God's country."
The gendarmes politely but regretfully agreed that it was impracticable for Burley to get a crack at a Hun; and the American presently took himself off to the corral, after distributing cigarettes and establishing cordial relations with the Sainte Lesse Gendarmerie.
He waked up a negro and inspected the[pg 176] mules; that took a long time. Then he sought out the negro blacksmith, awoke him, and wrote out some directions.
"The idea is," he explained, "that whenever the French in this sector need mules they draw on our corral. We are supposed to keep ten or eleven hundred mules here all the time and look after them. Shipments come every two weeks, I believe. So after you've had another good nap, George, you wake up your boys and get busy. And there'll be trouble if things are not in running order by tomorrow night."
"Yas, suh, Mistuh Burley," nodded the sleepy blacksmith, still blinking in the afternoon sunshine.
"And if you need an interpreter," added Burley, "always call on me until you learn French enough to get on. Understand, George?"