She stood a while, looking very earnestly across the wide, black
city of tents.
"I shall be best away for a time. I grow mad, treacherous, wicked here,"
she thought. "I will go and see Blanc-Bec."
Blanc-Bec was the soldier of the Army of Italy.
In a brief while she had saddled and bridled Etoile-Filante, and ridden
out of the camp without warning or farewell to any; she was as free to
come and to go as though she were a bird on the wing. Thus she went,
knowing nothing of his fate. And with the sunrise went also the woman
whom he loved--in ignorance.
CHAPTER XXXVI.
THE VENGEANCE OF THE LITTLE ONE.
The warm, transparent light of an African autumnal noon shone down
through the white canvas roof of a great tent in the heart of the
encamped divisions at the headquarters of the Army of the South. In
the tent there was a densely packed throng--an immense, close, hushed,
listening crowd, of which every man wore the uniform of France, of which
the mute, undeviating attention, forbidden by discipline alike to be
broken by sound of approval or dissent, had in it something that was
almost terrible, contrasted with the vivid eagerness in their eyes and
the strained absorption of their countenances; for they were in court,
and that court was the Council of War of their own southern camp.
The prisoner was arraigned on the heaviest charge that can be laid
against the soldier of any army, and yet, as the many eyes of the
military crowd turned on him where he stood surrounded by his guard,
his crime against his chief was forgotten, and they only
remembered--Zaraila.
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