“They brought him home on two poles.  He never stopped laughing all the way back, gesticulating with his arms and legs.

“This explained the mystery.  My men also drank the juice of the grapes, and when they were so intoxicated they could not stir they went to sleep in the vineyard.  As for Timbuctoo, his love of the vineyard was beyond all belief and all bounds.  He lived in it as did the thrushes, whom he hated with the jealous hate of a rival.  He repeated incessantly:  ’The thrushes eat all the grapes, captain!’

“One evening I was sent for.  Something had been seen on the plain coming in our direction.  I had not brought my field-glass and I could not distinguish things clearly.  It looked like a great serpent uncoiling itself—­a convoy.  How could I tell?

“I sent some men to meet this strange caravan, which presently made its triumphal entry.  Timbuctoo and nine of his comrades were carrying on a sort of altar made of camp stools eight severed, grinning and bleeding heads.  The African was dragging along a horse to whose tail another head was fastened, and six other animals followed, adorned in the same manner.

“This is what I learned:  Having started out to the vineyard, my Africans had suddenly perceived a detachment of Prussians approaching a village.  Instead of taking to their heels, they hid themselves, and as soon as the Prussian officers dismounted at an inn to refresh themselves, the eleven rascals rushed on them, put to flight the lancers, who thought they were being attacked by the main army, killed the two sentries, then the colonel and the five officers of his escort.

“That day I kissed Timbuctoo.  I saw, however, that he walked with difficulty and thought he was wounded.  He laughed and said: 

“‘Me provisions for my country.’

“Timbuctoo was not fighting for glory, but for gain.  Everything he found that seemed to him to be of the slightest value, especially anything that glistened, he put in his pocket.  What a pocket!  An abyss that began at his hips and reached to his ankles.  He had retained an old term used by the troopers and called it his ‘profonde,’ and it was his ‘profonde’ in fact.

“He had taken the gold lace off the Prussian uniforms, the brass off their helmets, detached their buttons, etc., and had thrown them all into his ‘profonde,’ which was full to overflowing.

“Each day he pocketed every glistening object that came beneath his observation, pieces of tin or pieces of silver, and sometimes his contour was very comical.

“He intended to carry all that back to the land of ostriches, whose brother he might have been, this son of a king, tormented with the longing to gobble up all objects that glistened.  If he had not had his ‘profonde’ what would he have done?  He doubtless would have swallowed them.

“Each morning his pocket was empty.  He had, then, some general store where his riches were piled up.  But where?  I could not discover it.