dashed the officers; crackling French oaths rolling
over their tongues with a snapping intonation, and their pistols
whirling right and left like slung-shot, and dropping a mutineer at
every blow. Habit and the rough usage overcame even the drunken frenzy
of the men, and they dropped the plunder from their arms, snatched
muskets from the corners they had been whirled into, and rapidly
dressed into line in the street.

I saw one beardless boy, slight and small, rush to a huge sergeant and
order him into ranks. The soldier, a perfect giant, hesitated to drop
the handful of shoes he had seized, only for a second. But that was
enough. The youth had to jump from the ground to seize his throat; but,
at the same moment, the stock of the heavy revolver crashed over his
temple, and he fell like a stricken ox.

"Roll that carrion into the street!" said the lieutenant to another
soldier near; and before his order was obeyed the store was empty.

In a half hour from the officers' arrival the battalion was mustered on
Main street, and only nine absentees were reported at roll-call; but
many a _fez_ was drawn far down over a bleeding forehead, and many a
villainous countenance was lighted by one eye, while the other was
closed and swollen.

The colonel and I had jumped from the car and run on with our French
friends; but the colonel was not the son of Atalanta, and by reason of
a _soupcon_ of gout his feet were not beautiful upon Zion or any other
place. Neither could he make them "swift to shed blood."

As we entered the street where the rioters were, I turned and saw him,
perfectly breathless, bear his two hundred and fifty pounds avoirdupois
against a door. It was not closed, but had only been slammed by the
score of _Zou-Zous_ enjoying the whisky within; and as I looked I
saw a dignified colonel in the C.S. army turn a complete somersault
into a group of red-legged devils, who immediately closed around him.

Gabriel Ravel, though a lighter man, never made a cleaner leap through
the third story in the side-scene; but there was no time to waste and I
went back at speed. I had scarcely turned when I saw the colonel's huge
form tower among the red-legs. By the time I reached the door my
apparition, revolver in hand, completed what he had begun; and they
slipped by and vanished.

Luckily the bar of the door had fallen with him, and the old gymnastics
of other days coming back like a flash, he had seized it, made two
rapid blo