to do!"

"Even you admit that I _have_ got to do it!" Valdez argued. "To save a
woman--it's to save her life, you know."

"I know," said Max. "But there may be some other way than this one in
your mind."

"If there is, I'll take it. And now I can give you back your money."

"No! You'll need every _sou_ if----"

"You're the best friend a man ever had!" cried the Spaniard.

At midnight the alarm they were all waiting for sounded, and though it
was expected at any hour, it came as a surprise.

"_Aux armes!_" rang out the call of the bugle from the barrack-yard and
waked the stone soldiers to instant life. The flat, carved figures sat
up on their narrow tombs in the moonlight, then sprang to their feet.
There was no need or thought of discipline with that glorious alarm
sounding in their ears! The men yelled with joy and roared from
dormitory to dormitory in the wonderful Legion language made up of
chosen bits from every other language of the world.

"Faites les sacs. En tenue de campagne d'Afrique!" bawled excited
corporals. Everything had to be done in about ten minutes; and though
all soldiers knew the programme thoroughly, and young soldiers had gone
through it in drill a hundred times, the real thing was somehow
different. Men stumbled over each other and forgot what to do first.
Corporals swore and threatened; but to an onlooker the work of packing
would have seemed to go by magic. At the end of the ten minutes the
barrack-yard was full of men lined up, ready for marching, and soldiers
of all nations thanked their gods for finding that the cartridges served
out to them from the magazine were not blank ones. They had all
protested their certainty that this march was for business; and when
they had heard that their colonel was going with them they had been
doubly sure; yet in their hearts they had anxiously admitted that it
was guesswork. Now these blessed cartridges packed full of the right
stuff put an end to furtive doubts.

As the companies formed up, the "Legion's March" was played, and the
young soldiers who had never heard it, unless whistled _sotto voce_ by
old Legionnaires, felt the thrill of its tempestuous strains in the
marrow of their bones.

Nowadays the great marches of the Foreign Legion are not what they once
were, unless for government maneuvers. When there is need of haste the
Legion goes by the railway the Legion has helped to lay; and only at the
end of the line begins the real business