But she stretched her hand out, and swept it backward to the
desert-border of the south with a gesture that had awe for them.
"Hush!" she said softly, with an accent in her voice that hushed the
riot of their rejoicing homage till it lulled like the lull in a storm.
"Give me no honor while they sleep yonder. With the dead lies the
glory!"
CHAPTER XXIX.
BY THE BIVOUAC FIRE.
"Hold!" cried Cigarette, interrupting herself in her chant in honor of
the attributes of war, as the Tringlo's mules which she was driving,
some three weeks after the fray of Zaraila, stopped, by sheer force of
old habit, in the middle of a green plateau on the outskirts of a camp
pitched in its center, and overlooked by brown, rugged scarps of rock,
with stunted bushes on their summits, and here and there a maritime
pine clinging to their naked slopes. At sight of the food-laden little
beasts, and the well-known form behind them, the Tirailleurs, Indigenes,
and the Zouaves, on whose side of the encampment she had approached,
rushed toward her with frantic shouts, and wild delight, and vehement
hurrahs in a tempest of vociferous welcome that might have stunned any
ears less used, and startled any nerves less steeled, to military life
than the Friend of the Flag. She signed back the shouting, disorderly
crowd with her mule-whip, as superbly as though she were a Marshal of
France signing back a whole army's mutiny.
"What children you are! You push, and scramble, and tear, like a set of
monkeys over a nut.
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