“What is it you will do?” he asked her.

“The best that shall lie in my power.  Do you the same.”

“Can his life yet be saved?”

“His honor may—­his honor shall.”

Her face had an exceeding beauty as she spoke though it was stern and rigid still, a look that was sublime gleamed over it.  She, the waif and stray of a dissolute camp, knew better than the scion of his own race how the doomed man would choose the vindication of his honor before the rescue of his life.  He laid his hand on her as she moved.

“Stay!—­stay!  One word——­”

She flung him off her again.

“This is no time for words.  Go to him—­coward!—­and let the balls that kill him reach you too, if you have one trait of manhood left in you!”

Then, swiftly as a swallow darts, she quitted him and flew on her headlong way, down through the pressure of the people, and the throngs of the marts, and the noise, and the color, and the movement of the streets.

The sun was scarce declined from its noon before she rode out of the city, on a half-bred horse of the Spahis, swift as the antelope and as wild, with her only equipment some pistols in her holsters, and a bag of rice and a skin of water slung at her saddle-bow.

They asked her where she went; she never answered.  The hoofs struck sharp echoes out of the rugged stones, and the people were scattered like chaff as she went at full gallop down through Algiers.  Her comrades, used to see her ever with some song in the air and some laugh on the lips as she went, looked after her with wonder as she passed them, silent, and with her face white and stern as though the bright, brown loveliness of it had been changed to alabaster.

“What is it with the Cigarette?” they asked each other.  None could tell; the desert horse and his rider flew by them as a swallow flies.  The gleam of her Cross and the colorless calm of the childlike face that wore the resolve of a Napoleon’s on it were the last they ever saw of Cigarette.

All her fluent, untiring speech was gone—­gone with the rose hue from her cheek, with the laugh from her mouth, with the child’s joyance from her heart; but the brave, stanch, dauntless spirit lived with a soldier’s courage, with a martyr’s patience.

And she rode straight through the scorch of the midday sun, along the sea-coast westward.  The dizzy swiftness would have blinded most who should have been carried through the dry air and under the burning skies at that breathless and pauseless speed; but she had ridden half-maddened colts with the skill of Arabs themselves; she had been tossed on a holster from her earliest years, and had clung with an infant’s hands in fearless glee to the mane of roughriders’ chargers.  She never swerved, she never sickened; she was borne on and on against the hard, hot currents of the cleft air with only one sense—­that she went so slowly, so slowly, when with every beat of the ringing hoofs one of the few moments of a charmed life fled away!