en again he might be
two hours, so his officer had told him to put the horses in the stable.
And as Maurice, whose curiosity was aroused, showed some disposition to
pump him, his face became as vacant as a blank page.

"Can't say. An errand of some sort--papers to be delivered."

But Rochas looked at the chasseur with an eye of tenderness, for the
uniform awakened old memories of Africa.

"Eh! my lad, where were you stationed out there?"

"At Medeah, Lieutenant."

Ah, Medeah! And drawing their chairs closer together they started a
conversation, regardless of difference in rank. The life of the
desert had become a second nature, for Prosper, where the trumpet was
continually calling them to arms, where a large portion of their time
was spent on horseback, riding out to battle as they would to the chase,
to some grand battue of Arabs. There was just one soup-basin for every
six men, or tribe, as it was called, and each tribe was a family by
itself, one of its members attending to the cooking, another washing
their linen, the others pitching the tent, caring for the horses, and
cleaning the arms. By day they scoured the country beneath a sun like
a ball of blazing copper, loaded down with the burden of their arms and
utensils; at night they built great fires to drive away the mosquitoes
and sat around them, singing the songs of France. Often it happened that
in the luminous darkness of the night, thick set with stars, they had
to rise and restore peace among their four-footed friends, who, in the
balmy softness of the air, had set to biting and kicking one another,
uprooting their pickets and neighing and snorting furiously. Then there
was the delicious coffee, their greatest, indeed their only, luxury,
which they ground by the primitive appliances of a carbine-butt and a
porringer, and afterward strained through a red woolen sash. But their
life was not one of unalloyed enjoyment; there were dark days, also,
when they were far from the abodes of civilized man with the enemy
before them. No more fires, then; no singing, no good times. There
were times when hunger, thirst and want of sleep caused them horrible
suffering, but no matter; they loved that daring, adventurous life, that
war of skirmishes, so propitious for the display of personal bravery and
as interesting as a fairy tale, enlivened by the _razzias_, which were
only public plundering on a larger scale, and by marauding, or the
private peculations of the chi