“What on earth’s that?” wondered Tartarin, suddenly aroused.

It was the bugles of the Chasseurs d’Afrique sounding the turn-out in the Mustapha barracks.  The stupefied lion-slayer rubbed his eyes, for he had believed himself out in the boundless wilderness; and do you know where he really was? —­ in a field of artichokes, between a cabbage-garden and a patch of beets.  His Sahara grew kitchen vegetables.

Close to him, on the pretty verdant slope of Upper Mustapha, the snowy villas glowed in the rosy rising sun:  anybody would believe himself in the neighbourhood of Marseilles, amongst its bastides and bastidons.

The commonplace and kitchen-gardenish aspect of this sleep-steeped country much astonished the poor man, and put him in bad humour.

“These folk are crazy,” he reasoned, “to plant artichokes in the prowling-ground of lions; for, in short, I have not been dreaming.  Lions have come here, and there’s the proof”

What he called the proof was blood-spots left behind the beast in its flight.  Bending over this ruddy trail with his eye on the lookout and his revolver in his fist, the valiant Tarasconian went from artichoke to artichoke up to a little field of oats.  In the trampled grass was a pool of blood, and in the midst of the pool, lying on its flank, with a large wound in the head, was a —­ guess what?

“A lion, of course!”

Not a bit of it!  An ass! —­ one of those little donkeys so common in Algeria, where they are called bourriquots.

VI. 
Arrival of the Female —­ A Terrible Combat —­
“Game Fellows Meet Here!”

Looking on his hapless victim, Tartarin’s first impulse was one of vexation.  There is such a wide gap between a lion and poor Jack!  His second feeling was one of pity.  The poor bourriquot was so pretty and looked so kindly.  The hide on his still warm sides heaved and fell like waves.  Tartarin knelt down, and strove with the end of his Algerian sash to stanch the blood; and all you can imagine in the way of touchingness was offered by the picture of this great man tending this little ass.

At the touch of the silky cloth the donkey, who had not twopennyworth of life in him, opened his large grey eye and winked his long ears two or three times, as much as to say, “Oh, thank you!” before a final spasm shook it from head to tail, whereafter it stirred no more.

“Noiraud!  Blackey!” suddenly screamed a voice, choking with anguish, as the branches in a thicket hard by moved at the same time.

Tartarin had no more than enough time to rise and stand upon guard.  This was the female!