A little farther on a dog's moan caught her ear; she turned
and looked across. Upright, among a ghastly pile of men and chargers,
sat the small, snowy poodle of the Chasseurs, beating the air with its
little paws, as it had been taught to do when it needed anything, and
howling piteously as it begged.
"Flick-Flack? What is it, Flick-Flack?" she cried to him, while, with a
bound, she reached the spot. The dog leaped on her, rejoicing. The dead
were thick there--ten or twelve deep--French trooper and Bedouin rider
flung across each other, horribly entangled with the limbs, the manes,
the shattered bodies of their own horses. Among them she saw the face
she sought, as the dog eagerly ran back, caressing the hair of a soldier
who lay underneath the weight of his gray charger, that had been killed
by a musket-ball.
Cigarette grew very pale, as she had never grown when the hailstorm of
shots had been pouring on her in the midst of a battle; but, with the
rapid skill and strength she had acquired long before, she reached the
place, lifted aside first one, then another of the lifeless Arabs that
had fallen above him, and drew out from beneath the suffocating pressure
of his horse's weight the head and the frame of the Chasseur whom
Flick-Flack had sought out and guarded.
For a moment she thought him dead; then, as she drew him out where
the cooled breeze of the declining day could reach him, a slow breath,
painfully drawn, moved his chest; she saw that he was unconscious from
the stifling oppression under which he had been buried since the noon;
an hour more without the touch of fresher air, and life would have been
extinct.
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