They had the woman.  She had been netted near a water-spring, to which she had wandered too loosely guarded, and too far from the Bedouin encampment.  The delight of the haughty Sidi’s eyes was borne off to the tents of his foe, and the Colonel’s face flushed darkly with an eager, lustful warmth, as he looked upon his captive.  Rumor had not outboasted the Arab girl’s beauty; it was lustrous as ever was that when, far yonder to the eastward, under the curled palms of Nile, the sorceress of the Caesars swept through her rose-strewn palace chambers.  Only Djelma was as innocent as the gazelle, whose grace she resembled, and loved her lord with a great love.

Of her suffering her captor took no more heed than if she were a young bird dying of shot-wounds; but, with one triumphant, admiring glance at her, he wrote a message in Arabic, to send to the Khalifa, ere her loss was discovered—­a message more cruel than iron.  He hesitated a second, where he lay at the opening of his tent, whom he should send with it.  His men were almost all half-dead with the sun-blaze.  His glance chanced to light in the distance on a soldier to whom he bore no love—­causelessly, but bitterly all the same.  He had him summoned, and eyed him with a curious amusement—­Chateauroy treated his squadrons with much the same sans-facon familiarity and brutality that a chief of filibusters uses in his.

“So! you heed the heat so little, you give up your turn of water to a drummer, they say?”

The Chasseur gave the salute with a calm deference.  A faint flush passed over the sun-bronze of his forehead.  He had thought the Sidney-like sacrifice had been unobserved.

“The drummer was but a child, mon Commandant.”

“Be so good as to give us no more of those melodramatic acts!” said M. le Marquis contemptuously.  “You are too fond of trafficking in those showy fooleries.  You bribe your comrades for their favoritism too openly.  Ventre bleu!  I forbid it—­do you hear?”

“I hear, mon Colonel.”

The assent was perfectly tranquil and respectful.  He was too good a soldier not to render perfect obedience, and keep perfect silence, under any goad of provocation to break both.

“Obey then!” said Chateauroy savagely.  “Well, since you love heat so well, you shall take a flag of truce and my scroll to the Sidi Ilderim.  But tell me, first, what do you think of this capture?”

“It is not my place to give opinions, M. le Colonel.”

“Pardieu!  It is your place when I bid you.  Speak, or I will have the stick cut the words out of you!”

“I may speak frankly?”

“Ten thousand curses—­yes!”

“Then, I think that those who make war on women are no longer fit to fight with men.”

For a moment the long, sinewy, massive form of Chateauroy started from the skins on which he lay at full length, like a lion started from its lair.  His veins swelled like black cords; under the mighty muscle of his bare chest his heart beat visibly in the fury of his wrath.