The colonel, with this whining crowd weeping about him, with Hirondelle’s erect figure confronting him, his black eyes regarding the cowards with scorn as he made his report—­the colonel simply could not understand the situation.  All these men!  “What are you—­soldiers?” he flung at the wretched group.  And one answered, “No, my officer.  We are not soldiers, we are the cooks.”  At that there was a wail.  “Ach!  Who, then, will the breakfast cook for my general?  He will schrecklich angry be for his sausage and his sauerkraut.”

By degrees the colonel got the story.  A number of cooks had combined to protest against new regulations, and the general, to punish this astounding insubordination, had sent them out unarmed, petrified with, terror, into No Man’s Land for an hour.  They had there encountered Hirondelle.  Hirondelle drew the attention of the colonel to the fact that he had promised prisoners, fat ones.  “Will my colonel regard the shape of these pigs,” suggested Hirondelle.  “And also that they are twenty in number.  Enough en masse for one man to take, is it not, my colonel?”

The little dinner-party at the Frontenac discussed this episode.  “Almost too good to be true, colonel,” I objected.  “You’re sure it is true?  Bring out your Hirondelle.  He ought to be home wounded, with a war cross on his breast, by now.”

The colonel smiled and shook his head.  “It is that which I cannot do—­show you my Hirondelle.  Not here, and not in France, by malheur.  For he ventured once too often and too far, as the captain prophesied, and he is dead.  God rest the brave!  Also a Croix de Guerre is indeed his, but no Hirondelle is there to claim it.”

The silence of a moment was a salute to the soul of a warrior passed to the happy hunting-grounds.  And then I began on another story of my Rafael’s adventures which something in the colonel’s tale suggested.

The colonel, his winning face all a smile, interrupted.  “Does one believe, then, in this Rafael of m’sieur who caps me each time my tales of my Huron Hirondelle?  It appears to me that m’sieur has the brain, of a story-teller and hangs good stories on a figure which he has built and named so—­Rafael.  Me, I cannot believe there exists this Rafael.  I believe there is only one such gallant d’Artagnan of the Hurons, and it is—­it was—­my Hirondelle.  Show me your Rafael, then!” demanded the colonel.

At that challenge the scheme which had flashed into my mind an hour ago gathered shape and power.  “I will show him to you, colonel,” I took up the challenge, “if you will allow me.”  I turned to include the others.  “Isn’t it possible for you all to call a truce and come up tomorrow to my club to be my guests for as long or as short a time as you will?  I can’t say how much pleasure it would give me, and I believe I could give you something also—­great fishing, shooting, a moose, likely, or at least a caribou—­and Rafael.  I promise Rafael.  It’s not unlikely, colonel, that he may have known the Hirondelle.  The Hurons are few.  Do come,” I threw at them.