d in his quality of mahout. The crowd pressed forward again,
reassured by the "Chomit oll en ho trankilite!"

Speed swallowed the last crumb of his sandwich, wiped his hands on his
handkerchief, and shoved them into his shabby pockets; the ankus
dangled from his wrist.

We were in seedy circumstances; an endless chain of bad luck had
followed us from Chartres--bad weather, torrents of rain, flooded
roads, damaging delays on railways already overcrowded with troops
and war material, and, above all, we encountered everywhere that
ominous apathy which burdened the whole land, even those provinces
most remote from the seat of war. The blockade of Paris had paralyzed
France.

The fortune that Byram had made in the previous year was already gone;
we no longer travelled by rail; we no longer slept at inns; we could
barely pay for the food for our animals.

As for the employes, the list had been cut down below the margin of
safety, yet for a month no salaries had been paid.

As I stood there in the public square of Quimperle, passing the
cooling sponge over my horse's nose, old Byram came out of the hotel
on the corner, edged his way through the stolid crowd that surrounded
us gaunt mountebanks, and shuffled up to me.

"I guess we ain't goin' to push through to-night, Scarlett," he
observed, wiping his sweating forehead on the sleeve of his linen
duster.

"No, governor, it's too far," I said.

"We'll be all right, anyway," added Speed; "there's a change in the
moon and this warm weather ought to hold, governor."

"I dunno," said Byram, with an abstracted glance at the crowd around
the elephant.

"Cheer up, governor," I said, "we ought at least to pay expenses to
the Spanish frontier. Once out of France we'll find your luck again
for you."

"Mebbe," he said, almost wearily.

I glanced at Speed. This was the closest approach to a whine that we
had heard from Byram. But the man had changed within a few days; his
thin hair, brushed across his large, alert ears, was dusty and
unkempt; hollows had formed under his shrewd eyes; his black
broadcloth suit was as soiled as his linen, his boots shabby, his
silk hat suitable only for the stage property of our clown.

"Don't ride too far," said Byram, as I set foot to stirrup, "them
band-wagon teams is most done up, an' that there camuel gits meaner
every minute."

I wheeled my horse out into the road to Paradise, cursing the
"camuel," the bane of our wearied caravan.