Suddenly, as she went,
she heard a shout on the still night air--very still, now that the
lights, and the melodies, and the laughter of Chateauroy's villa lay
far behind, and the town of Algiers was yet distant, with its lamps
glittering down by the sea.
The shout was, "A moi, Roumis! Pour la France!" And Cigarette knew the
voice, ringing melodiously and calm still, though it gave the sound of
alarm.
"Cigarette au secour!" she cried in answer; she had cried it many a time
over the heat of battlefields, and when the wounded men in the dead of
the sickly night writhed under the knife of the camp-thieves. If she had
gone like the wind before, she went like the lightning now.
A few yards onward she saw a confused knot of horses and of riders
struggling one with another in a cloud of white dust, silvery and hazy
in the radiance of the moon.
The center figure was Cecil's; the four others were Arabs, armed to
the teeth and mad with drink, who had spent the whole day in drunken
debauchery; pouring in raki down their throats until they were wild with
its poisonous fire, and had darted headlong, all abreast, down out of
the town; overriding all that came in their way, and lashing their poor
beasts with their sabers till the horses' flanks ran blood. Just as they
neared Cecil they had knocked aside and trampled over a worn out old
colon, of age too feeble for him to totter in time from their path.
Cecil had reined up and shouted to them to pause; they, inflamed with
the perilous drink, and senseless with the fury which seems to possess
every Arab once started in a race neck-to-neck, were too blind to see,
and too furious to care, that they were faced by a soldier of France,
but rode down on him at once, with their curled sabers flashing round
their heads.
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