le Colonel."
"Pardieu! It is your place when I bid you. Speak, or I will have the
stick cut the words out of you!"
"I may speak frankly?"
"Ten thousand curses--yes!"
"Then, I think that those who make war on women are no longer fit to
fight with men."
For a moment the long, sinewy, massive form of Chateauroy started from
the skins on which he lay at full length, like a lion started from its
lair. His veins swelled like black cords; under the mighty muscle of his
bare chest his heart beat visibly in the fury of his wrath.
"By God! I have a mind to have you shot like a dog!"
The Chasseur looked at him carelessly, composedly, but with a serene
deference still, as due from a soldier to his chief.
"You have threatened it before, M. le Colonel. It may be as well to do
it, or the army may think you capricious."
Raoul de Chateauroy crushed a blasphemous oath through his clinched
teeth, and laughed a certain short, stern, sardonic laugh, which his men
dreaded more than his wrath.
"No; I will send you instead to the Khalifa. He often saves me the
trouble of killing my own curs. Take a flag of truce and this paper, and
never draw rein till you reach him, if your beast drop dead at the end."
The Chasseur saluted, took the paper, bowed with a certain languid, easy
grace that camp life never cured him of, and went. He knew that the
man who should take the news of his treasure's loss to the Emir Ilderim
would, a thousand to one, perish by every torture desert cruelty could
frame, despite the cover of the white banner.
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