To make a dash at the
boy, though to linger a moment was to risk certain death; to send his
steel through an Arab who came in his way; to lean down and catch hold
of the lad's sash; to swing him up into his saddle and throw him
across it in front of him, and to charge afresh through the storm of
musket-balls, and ride on thus burdened, was the work of ten seconds
with "Bel-a-faire-peur." And he brought the boy safe over a stretch of
six leagues in a flight for life, though the imp no more deserved the
compassion than a scorpion that has spent all its noxious day stinging
at every point of uncovered flesh would merit tenderness from the hand
it had poisoned.
When he was swung down from the saddle and laid in front of a fire,
sheltered from the bitter north wind that was then blowing cruelly, the
bright, black, ape-like eyes of the Parisian diablotin opened with a
strange gleam in them.
"Picpon s'en souviendra," he murmured.
And Picpon had kept his word; he had remembered often, he remembered
now; standing on his head and thinking of his hundred Napoleons
surrendered because thieving and lying in the regiment gave pain to
that oddly prejudiced "ci-devant." This was the sort of loyalty that the
Franco-Arabs rendered; this was the sort of influence that the English
Guardsman exercised among his Roumis.
Meantime, while Picpon made a human cone of himself, to the admiration
of the polyglot crowd of the Algerine street, Cecil himself, having
watered, fed, and littered down his tired horse, made his way to a
little cafe he commonly frequented, and spent the few sous he could
afford on an iced draught of lemon-flavored drink.
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