ed
all down the hot and silent air.

Hers was a dashing, dauntless, vivacious life, just in its youth, loving
plunder, and mischief, and mirth; caring for nothing; and always ready
with a laugh, a song, a slang repartee, or a shot from the dainty
pistols thrust in her sash, that a general of division had given her,
whichever best suited the moment. She had never shed tears in her life.

Her mother a camp-follower, her father nobody knew who, a spoiled child
of the Army from her birth, with a heart as bronzed as her cheek;
yet with odd, stray, nature-sown instincts here and there, of a
devil-may-care nobility, and of a wild grace that nothing could
kill--Cigarette was the pet of the Army of Africa, and was as lawless as
most of her patrons.

She would eat a succulent duck, thinking it all the spicier because it
had been a soldier's "loot"; she would wear the gold plunder off dead
Arabs' dress, and never have a pang of conscience with it; she would
dance all night long, when she had a chance, like a little Bacchante;
she would shoot a man, if need be, with all the nonchalance in the
world. She had had a thousand lovers, from handsome marquises of the
Guides to tawny, black-browed scoundrels in the Zouaves, and she had
never loved anything, except the roll of the pas de charge, and the
sight of her own arch, defiant face, with its scarlet lips and its short
jetty hair, when she saw it by chance in some burnished cuirass, that
served her for a mirror. She was more like a handsome, saucy boy than
anything else under the sun, and yet there was that in the pretty,
impudent, little Friend of the Flag that was feminine with it
all--generous and graceful amid all her boldness, and her license, her
revelries, and the unsettled life she led in the barracks and the camps,
under the shadow of the eagles.

Away she went down the crooked windings and over the ruined gardens of
the old Moorish quarter of the Cashbah; the hilts of the tiny pistols
glancing in the sun, and the fierce fire of the burning sunlight pouring
down unheeded on the brave, bright hawk eyes that had never, since they
first opened to the world, drooped or dimmed for the rays of the sun, or
the gaze of a lover; for the menace of death, or the presence of war.

Of course, she was a little Amazon; of course, she was a little
Guerrilla; of course, she did not know what a blush meant; of course,
her thoughts were as slang and as riotous as her mutinous mischief was