ash for liberty from Sidi-bel-Abbes. He
got no farther than the outskirts, the forbidden _Village Negre_, where
he risked a night visit in search of the man bribed to hide a certain
precious bundle. Fortunately he was arrested before securing it, for had
he been trapped with civilian clothes not even his marvellous voice (the
talk of the garrison since it had been heard in the soldier's theatre)
could have saved him from the fate of caught deserters: the penal
battalion for months, if not a year; death, perhaps, from fever or
hardship. As it was, he escaped with the penalty for a night visit to
the Arab quarter: eight days _cellule_. But the clothes were safe. He
would try again. Nothing on earth, he said, should keep him from trying
again; because he might as well be a "Zephir" in the dreaded "Batt
d'Aff," if he could not answer the cry for help he seemed always to hear
from across the desert.

Since his first failure and imprisonment nearly four months had passed,
and he had tried again and failed in the same way. The second time his
sentence was twice as long; but before it was over the _medecin major_
sent him into hospital. He came out emaciated, sullen, dangerous, caring
for nothing, not even to sing. Max yearned over him, but could do
nothing except say, "It isn't too late yet. Maybe, if we brace up, we'll
be taken on the big march that they talk of for the first of September.
Even then there'll be time."

He said "we," because it was more comforting to Valdez that their names
should be bracketed together as friends; but as Legionnaires they were
already far apart. Max had never been censured, had never seen the
inside of the prison building (that low-roofed, sinister building that
runs along the walls of the barrack-yard). He was in the school of
corporals. Soon he would wear on his blue sleeve the coveted red woollen
stripe. Garcia, on the contrary, was constantly falling into trouble. He
had even drunk too much, once or twice, in the hope of drowning trouble,
as Legionnaires do. The September march to the south was ostensibly for
road-laying; but there was again a rumour of other important work to be
done. The great secret society of the Senussi threatened trouble through
a new leader who had arisen, a young man of the far south called the
"Deliverer." And when there was prospect of fighting in the desert or
elsewhere for the Legion, recruits--even those who had served for six
months--were seldom taken if a l