a fountain.  ’I come of a great race, that never took insult without giving back death,’ was all that Marquise said when they seized him and brought him to judgment; and he would never say of what race that was.  They shot him—­ah, bah! discipline must be kept—­and I saw him with five great wounds in his chest, and his beautiful golden hair all soiled with the sand and the powder, lying there by the open grave, that they threw him into as if he were offal; and we never knew more of him than that.”

Cigarette’s radiant laugh had died, and her careless voice had sunk, over the latter words.  As the little vivacious brunette told the tale of a nameless life, it took its eloquence from her, simple and brief as her speech was; and it owned a deeper pathos because the reckless young Bacchante of the As de Pique grew grave one moment while she told it.  Then, grave still, she leaned her brown, bright face nearer down from her oval hole in the wall.

“Now,” she whispered very low, “if you mutiny once, they will shoot you just like Marquise, and you will die just as silent, like him.”

“Well,” he answered her slowly, “why not?  Death is no great terror; I risk it every day for the sake of a common soldier’s rations; why should I not chance it for the sake and in the defense of my honor?”

“Bah! men sell their honor for their daily bread all the world over!” said Cigarette, with the satire that had treble raciness from the slang in which she clothed it.  “But it is not you alone.  See here—­one example set on your part, and half your regiment will mutiny too.  It is bitter work to obey the Black Hawk, and if you give the signal of revolt, three parts of your comrades will join you.  Now what will that end in, beau lion?”

“Tell me—­you are a soldier yourself, you say.”

“Yes, I am a soldier!” said Cigarette between her tight-set teeth, while her eyes brightened, and her voice sank down into a whisper that had a certain terrible meaning in it, like the first dropping of the scattered, opening shots in the distance before a great battle commences; “and I have seen war, not holiday war, but war in earnest—­war when men fall like hailstones, and tear like tigers, and choke like mad dogs with their throats full of blood and sand; when the gun-carriage wheels go crash over the writhing limbs, and the horses charge full gallop over the living faces, and the hoofs beat out the brains before death has stunned them senseless.  Oh, yes!  I am a soldier, and I will tell you one thing I have seen.  I have seen soldiers mutiny, a squadron of them, because they hated their chief and loved two of their sous-officers; and I have seen the end of it all—­a few hundred men, blind and drunk with despair, at bay against as many thousands, and walled in with four lines of steel and artillery, and fired on from a score of cannon-mouths—­volley on volley, like the thunder—­till not one living man was left, and there was only a shapeless, heaving, moaning mass, with the black smoke over all.  That is what I have seen; you will not make me see it again?”