seems
that some things had been stolen from the officers' quarters, and nobody
could tell who had done it. The first thing next morning the colonel
went along the line at early parade, giving each of the native soldiers
a small strip of bamboo; and then he said, very solemnly, 'My children,
there is a guilty man among us, and it has been revealed to me by Brahma
himself how his guilt is to be made clear. Let every man of you come
forward in his turn and give me his piece of bamboo; and the thief, let
him do what he may, will have the longest piece.'

"Now, you know what superstitious hounds those Asiatic fellows always
are; and when they heard this announcement they all looked at each other
like children going to be whipped. The colonel took the bamboos one
after another, as solemnly as if he were on a court-martial, but when
about a dozen men had gone past he suddenly sprang forward and seized
one of them by the throat, shouting at the full pitch of his voice, 'You
are the man!'

"Down went the fellow on his knees and yelled for mercy, confessing that
he _was_ the man, sure enough. As for the rest, they looked as
frightened as if all the gods in the caverns of Elephanta had come
flying down among them at once; and from that day forth they salaamed to
the very ground at the mere sight of the colonel half a mile off.

"'How on earth did you manage that, colonel?' asked the senior major, a
great fat fellow, as stupid as a carp.[7]

"'Nothing simpler, my dear fellow,' answered De Malet, laughing. 'The
strips were all exactly the same length, and the thief, fearing to get
the longest piece, betrayed himself by _biting off the end_.'

"This, as you may think, added a good deal to the colonel's reputation;
and when we had that affair with the Bedouins at Laghouat we soon saw
that he could fight as well as manoeuvre. In the thick of the skirmish
one of the rogues, seeing De Malet left alone, flew at him with drawn
yataghan, but the colonel just dropped on his horse's neck and let the
blow pass over him, and then gave point and ran the fellow right through
the body, as neatly as any fencing-master could have done it. You may be
sure we thought none the less of him after that; but all this was
nothing to what was coming.

"Well, De Malet had been with us about a year when the railway was begun
from Algiers to Blidah, and the directing engineer happened to be one of
my greatest friends, Eugene Latour, as good a fellow as I