arts, and the noise, and the color, and the movement of the
streets.

The sun was scarce declined from its noon before she rode out of the
city, on a half-bred horse of the Spahis, swift as the antelope and as
wild, with her only equipment some pistols in her holsters, and a bag of
rice and a skin of water slung at her saddle-bow.

They asked her where she went; she never answered. The hoofs struck
sharp echoes out of the rugged stones, and the people were scattered
like chaff as she went at full gallop down through Algiers. Her
comrades, used to see her ever with some song in the air and some laugh
on the lips as she went, looked after her with wonder as she passed
them, silent, and with her face white and stern as though the bright,
brown loveliness of it had been changed to alabaster.

"What is it with the Cigarette?" they asked each other. None could tell;
the desert horse and his rider flew by them as a swallow flies. The
gleam of her Cross and the colorless calm of the childlike face that
wore the resolve of a Napoleon's on it were the last they ever saw of
Cigarette.

All her fluent, untiring speech was gone--gone with the rose hue from
her cheek, with the laugh from her mouth, with the child's joyance
from her heart; but the brave, stanch, dauntless spirit lived with a
soldier's courage, with a martyr's patience.

And she rode straight through the scorch of the midday sun, along the
sea-coast westward. The dizzy swiftness would have blinded most who
should have been carried through the dry air and under the burning skies
at that breathless and pauseless speed; but she had ridden half-maddened
colts with the skill of Arabs themselves; she had been tossed on a
holster from her earliest years, and had clung with an infant's hands in
fearless glee to the mane of roughriders' chargers. She never swerved,
she never sickened; she was borne on and on against the hard, hot
currents of the cleft air with only one sense--that she went so slowly,
so slowly, when with every beat of the ringing hoofs one of the few
moments of a charmed life fled away!

She had a long route before her; she had many leagues to travel, and
there were but four-and-twenty hours, she knew well, left to the man who
was condemned to death. Four-and-twenty hours left open for appeal--no
more--betwixt the delivery and execution of the sentence. That delay
was always interpreted by the French Code as a delay extending from the
evening of the day