land had turned adrift, and France had
won in her stead, concluded his long oration by dropping on his knees to
refill his Corporal's pipe.

"An army's just a machine, sir, in course," he concluded, as he rammed
in the Turkish tobacco. "But then it's a live machine, for all that;
and each little bit of it feels for itself, like the joints in an eel's
body. Now, if only one of them little bits smarts, the whole creature
goes wrong--there's the mischief."

Bel-a-faire-peur listened thoughtfully to his comrade where he lay flung
full-length on the skins.

"I dare say you are right enough. I knew nothing of my men when--when I
was in England; we none of us did; but I can very well believe what
you say. Yet--fine fellows though they are here, they are terrible
blackguards!"

"In course they are, sir; they wouldn't be such larky company unless
they was. But what I say is that they're scamps who're told they may be
great men, if they like; not scamps who're told that, because they've
once gone to the devil, they must always keep there. It makes all the
difference in life."

"Yes--it makes all the difference in life, whether hope is left,
or--left out!"

The words were murmured with a half smile that had a dash of infinite
sadness in it; the other looked at him quickly with a shadow of keen
pain passing over the bright, frank, laughing features of his sunburned
face; he knew that the brief words held the whole history of a life.

"Won't there never be no hope, sir?" he whispered, while his voice
trembled a little under the long, fierce sweep of his yellow mustaches.

The Chasseur rallied himself with a slight, careless laugh; the laugh
with which he had met before now the onslaught of charges ferocious as
those of the magnificent day of Mazagran.

"Whom for? Both of us? Oh, yes; very likely we shall achieve fame and
die! A splendid destiny."

"No, sir," said the other, with the hesitation still in the quiver of
his voice. "You know I meant, no hope of your ever being again----"

He stopped, he scarcely knew how to phrase the thoughts he was thinking.

The other moved with a certain impatience.

"How often must I tell you to forget that I was ever anything except a
soldier of France?--forget as I have forgotten it!"

The audacious, irrepressible "Crache-au-nez-d'la-Mort," whom nothing
could daunt and nothing could awe, looked penitent and ashamed as a
chidden spaniel.

"I know, sir. I have tried, many a year;