They hesitated to take her message, to do her bidding.  The one whom she sought was great and supreme here as a king; they dreaded to approach his staff, to ask his audience.

Cigarette looked at them a moment, then loosened her Cross and held it out to an adjutant standing beneath the gates.

“Take that to the man who gave it me.  Tell him Cigarette waits; and with each moment that she waits a soldier’s life is lost.  Go!”

The adjutant took it, and went.  Over and over again she had brought intelligence of an Arab movement, news of a contemplated razzia, warning of an internal revolt, or tidings of an encounter on the plains, that had been of priceless value to the army which she served.  It was not lightly that Cigarette’s words were ever received when she spoke as she spoke now; nor was it impossible that she now brought to them that which would brook neither delay nor trifling.

She waited patiently; all the iron discipline of military life had never bound her gay and lawless spirit down; but now she was singularly still and mute.  Only there gleamed thirstily in her eyes that fearful avarice which begrudges every moment in its flight as never the miser grudged his hoarded gold into the robber’s grasp.

A few minutes and the decoration was brought back to her, and her demand granted.  She was summoned to the Marshal’s presence.  It was the ordnance room, a long, vast, silent chamber filled with stands of arms, with all the arts and appliances of war brought to their uttermost perfection, and massed in all the resource of a great empire against the sons of the desert, who had nothing to oppose to them save the despair of a perishing nationality and a stifled freedom.

The Marshal, leaning against a brass field-piece, turned to her with a smile in his keen, stern eyes.

“You, my young one!  What brings you here?”

She came up to him with her rapid leopard-like grace, and he started as he saw the change upon her features.  She was covered with sand and dust, and with the animal’s blood-flecked foam.  The beating of her heart from the fury of the gallop had drained every hue from her face; her voice was scarcely articulate in its breathless haste as she saluted him.

“Monsieur, I have come from Algiers since noon—­”

“From Algiers!” He and his officers echoed the name of the city in incredulous amaze; they knew how far from them down along the sea-line the white town lay.

“Since noon, to rescue a life—­the life of a great soldier, of a guiltless man.  He who saved the honor of France at Zaraila is to die the death of a mutineer at dawn!”

“What!—­your Chasseur!”

A dusky, scarlet fire burned through the pallor of her face; but her eyes never quailed, and the torrent of her eloquence returned under the pangs of shame that were beaten back under the noble instincts of her love.