"Oh, ho!" cried the little lady, with supreme disdain; "they don't twist
cocks' throats and skin rabbits they have thieved, perhaps, like yours;
but they would wring your neck before breakfast to get an appetite, if
they could touch such canaille."
"Canaille?" thundered the insulted Barbe-Grise. "If you were but a man!"
"What would you do to me, brigand?" screamed Cigarette, in fits of
laughter. "Give me fifty blows of a stick, as your officers gave you
last week for stealing his gun from a new soldier?"
A growl like a lion's from the badgered Barbe-Grise shook the walls; she
had cast her mischievous stroke at him on a very sore point; the unhappy
young conscript's rifle having been first dexterously thieved from him,
and then as dexterously sold to an Arab.
"Sacre bleu!" he roared; "you are in love with this conqueror of
women--this soldier aristocrat!"
The only answer to this unbearable insult was a louder tumult of
laughter; a crash, a splash, and a volley of oaths from Barbe-Grise.
Cigarette had launched a bottle of vin ordinaire at him, blinded his
eyes, and drenched his beard with the red torrent and the shower of
glass slivers, and was back again dancing like a little Bacchante, and
singing at the top of her sweet, lark-like voice.
At the sound of the animated altercation, not knowing but what one
of his own troopers might be the delinquent, he who leaned out of the
little casement moved forward to the doorway of the dancing room; he
did not guess that it was himself whom she had defended against the
onslaught of the Zephyr, Barbe-Grise.
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