[*] The star on the metal buttons of the insubordinates, or Zephyrs.

Cecil’s eyes rested on him with a look that said far more than his answer.

“Rake, I know you better than you would let me do, if you had your way.  My noble fellow!  You reject advancement, and earn yourself an unjust reputation for mutinous conduct, because you are too generous to be given a step above mine in the regiment.”

“Who’s been a-telling you that trash, sir?” retorted Rake, with ferocity.

“No matter who.  It is no trash.  It is a splendid loyalty of which I am utterly unworthy, and it shall be my care that it is known at the Bureaus, so that henceforth your great merits may be—­”

“Stop that, sir!” cried Rake vehemently.  “Stow that, if you please!  Promoted I won’t be—­no, not if the Emperor hisself was to order it, and come across here to see it done!  A pretty thing, surely!  Me a officer, and you never a one—­me a-commanding of you, and you a-saluting of me!  By the Lord, sir! we might as well see the camp-scullions a-riding in state, and the Marshals a-scouring out the soup-pots!”

“Not at all.  This Army has not a finer soldier than yourself; you have a right to the reward of your services in it.  And I assure you you do me a great injustice if you think I would not as willingly go out under your orders as under those of all the Marshals of the Empire.”

The tears rushed into the hardy eyes of the redoubtable “Crache-au-nez-d’la-Mort,” though he dashed them away in a fury of eloquence.

“Sir, if you don’t understand as how you’ve given me a power more than all the crosses in the world in saying of them there words, why, you don’t know me much either, that’s all.  You’re a gentleman—­a right on rare thing that is—­and being a gentleman, a-course you’d be too generous and too proud like not to behave well to me, whether I was a-serving you as I’ve always served you, or a-insulting of you by riding over your head in that way as we’re speaking on.  But I know my place, sir, and I know yours.  If it wasn’t for that ere Black Hawk—­damn him!—­I can’t help it, sir; I will damn him, if he shoot me for it—­you’d been a Chef d’Escadron by now.  There ain’t the leastest doubt of it.  Ask all the zigs what they think.  Well, sir, now you know I’m a man what do as I say.  If you don’t let me have my own way, and if you do the littlest thing to get me a step, why, sir, I swear, as I’m a living being, that I’ll draw on Chateauroy the first time I see him afterward, and slit his throat as I’d slit a jackal’s!  There—­my oath’s took!”

And Cecil saw that it would also be kept.  The natural lawlessness and fiery passion inborn in Rake had of course not been cooled by the teaching of African warfare; and his hate was intense against the all-potent Chief of his regiment; as intense as the love he bore to the man whom he had followed out into exile.

Cecil tried vainly to argue with him; all his reasonings fell like hailstones on a cuirass, and made no more impression; he was resolute.