ON THE STATION PLATFORM

They dined together in a glass-fronted restaurant opening out on to the terrace, and Sanda was sweet, but absent-minded. Max could guess where her thoughts were, and almost hated Stanton. How could the man let some wretched engagement, with a few French officers, keep him from this poor little girl who adored him? How could Stanton let her go alone to meet her unnatural father (it was thus that Max thought of Colonel DeLisle) when as her one-time guardian he might have taken her to Sidi-bel-Abbés himself, and persuaded his old friend, DeLisle, to be lenient. All that Max had heard against the explorer came back to him, and he was ready to believe Stanton the cruel and selfish egoist that gossip sketched him. Poor Sanda!

Miss DeLisle had meant to finish her long journey as she had begun it, second-class; but Max persuaded the girl to let him take for her a first-class ticket, with coupé lit, in a compartment for women, as far as the station where at dawn they must change for Sidi-bel-Abbés. She was surprised at the smallness of the price, but did not suspect that she owed her new friend anything more substantial than gratitude for all the trouble he had taken for her comfort.

Max himself went second-class, packed in with seven men who would have thought opening the window a symptom of insanity.

One of the seven was the man with whom Sanda DeLisle had chatted on board the General Morel at dinner. He was the hero of the compartment, for he was going to Sidi-bel-Abbés to fight a boxing match with the champion of the Legion, a soldier named Pelle. Four of the travellers (three men of Algiers and a youth of Sidi-bel-Abbés) were accompanying the French boxer, having met him at the ship.

Dozing and waking, Max heard excited talk of la boxe and the coming event. He was vaguely interested, for he had been the champion boxer of his regiment—a hundred years ago!—but he was too weary in body and mind to care much about a match at Sidi-bel-Abbés. When he was not trying to sleep, he was mentally composing a letter to his colonel, with discreet explanations, and a justification of his forthcoming immediate resignation from the army: or else a written explanation of his farewell to Billie, following up the telegram; or thinking out business directions to Edwin Reeves. Suddenly, however, as he was dully wondering how best to send the heiress to New York without going back himself, a name spoken almost in his ear had the blinding effect of a searchlight upon his brain.

"La petite Josephine Delatour," said the young man who lived at Bel-Abbés. He was evidently answering some question which Max had not caught.

"The handsomest, would you call her?" disputed a commercial traveller, who also knew the town. "Ah, that, no! she is too strange, too bizarre."

"But her strangeness is her charm, mon ami! She has eyes of topaz, like those of a young panther. If she were not bizarre, would she—a little nobody at all—be strong enough to draw the smart young officers after her? There are girls in Bel-Abbés, daughters of rich merchants, who are jealous of the secretary at the Hotel Splendide. Before she came, it was only the officers of high rank who messed there. Now it is also the lieutenants. It is not the food, but Mademoiselle Josephine who attracts!"

"Once upon a time she thought me and my comrades good enough for a flirtation," said the commercial traveller. "But she looks higher in these days, especially since her namesake in the Spahis joined his regiment at Bel-Abbés. She told me they had found out that they were cousins."

"The lieutenant doesn't go about boasting of the relationship," laughed the youth from Bel-Abbés. "He comes to my father's café, which is the best in the town, as you well know. If any one speaks to him of la petite, he laughs: and it is a laugh she would not like."

Max's ears tingled. He felt as if he were eavesdropping. He wished to hear more, though at the same time it seemed that he had no right to listen. Luckily or unluckily, the boxer broke in and changed the subject.

Early in the morning, passengers for Sidi-bel-Abbés had to descend from the train going on to Oran, and take a slow one, on a branch line. It was a very slow one, indeed, and it was also late, so that it would be nearly midday and the hour for dejeuner when they reached their destination. Max saw himself inquiring for Mademoiselle Delatour just at the moment when the admirers of her topaz eyes were assembling for their meal. He did not like the prospect; but said nothing of his own worries to Sanda, whom he joined on changing trains. Now the meeting with her father was so near, she had to hold her courage with both hands. She had realized for the first time that she would not know where to look for Colonel DeLisle. He might be in barracks. She could hardly go to him there. He would perhaps be angry, should a girl arrive, announcing herself as his daughter, at the house where he had rooms. The third alternative was the Hotel Splendide, where he took his meals. He might already be there when she reached Sidi-bel-Abbés. What a place for a first meeting! Max agreed, sympathetically. It seemed that everything at Sidi-bel-Abbés must happen at the Hotel Splendide!

"If you could only be with me and help, as you have helped me all along!" she sighed. "Though of course you can't. If Sir Knight had come—— But I couldn't easily explain you to my father. At least, not just at present."

Max saw this, even more clearly than she saw it. It would indeed be difficult for a strange new daughter to explain in a few brief words a still more strange young man to such a person as Colonel DeLisle. If he were to be introduced or even mentioned at all, Max felt that it would have to be later, and must depend on the word of the redoubtable colonel. He suggested to Sanda as discreetly as he could that he would keep out of her way at the hotel, unless she summoned him. But, he added, he would have to be there for a short time at all events, because his business was taking him precisely to the Hotel Splendide.

"The person you're looking for is staying there?" asked Sanda.

"She's the secretary of the hotel." Max hesitated an instant, then, realizing from the words he had overheard how conspicuous a character Josephine Delatour evidently was, he thought best to tell Sanda something more of his story than he had told her yet. He sketched the version, vindicating his foster-mother, which he had given to Billie Brookton and the Reeveses—a version which all the world at home would, he believed, soon hear.

"So that is it?" said Sanda. "You're giving up everything to this girl. Do you think she will take it?"

"I wish I were as sure of what I shall do next as I am sure of that," laughed Max. If there had ever been any doubt in his mind as to Josephine's attitude, it had vanished while listening to the talk of her in the train.

"I know what you ought to do next," Sanda said. "You ought to be what you have been—a soldier."

"I shall always be, at heart, I think," Max confessed. "But soldier life is over for me, so far as I can see ahead."

"I wonder——" she began eagerly, then stopped abruptly.

"You wonder—what?"

"I daren't say it."

"Please dare."

"I mustn't. It would be wrong. I might be horribly sorry afterward. And yet——"

She silenced herself with a little gasp. He urged her no more, but stared almost unseeingly out of the window at the roofed farmhouses, and the yellow hills, like reclaimed desert, with bright patches of cultivation, and a far, floating background of the blue Thesala mountains.

Sidi-bel-Abbés at last! and the train slowing down along the platform of an insignificant station, which might have been in the South of France, save for a few burnoused Arabs. There was a green glimpse of olives and palms, and taller plane trees, under a serene sky; and in the distance the high fortified walls of yellow and dark gray stone, which ringed in the northernmost stronghold of the Foreign Legion.

"Sidi-bel-Abbés!" a deep voice shouted musically from one end of the platform to the other, as the train came in; and the name thrilled through Max Doran's veins as it had not ceased to thrill since yesterday. More strongly than ever he had the impression that some great things would happen to him here, or begin to happen, and carry him on elsewhere, beyond those yellow hills. Deep down in him excitement stirred in the dark, like a dazed traveller up before the dawn, groping for the door through which he must pass to begin his journey. All the more quietly, however, because of what he secretly felt, Max took Sanda's bag and his own, and gave her a hand for the high step from the train to platform. There they became units in a crowd strange to see at a little provincial station; a crowd to be met at few other places in the world.

The French boxer was not the only guest of importance this train brought to Sidi-bel-Abbés. At the far end of the platform, where the first-class carriages had stopped, a group of officers in full dress were collected round a man who wore civilian clothes awkwardly, as an old soldier wears them. There was the sensationally splendid costume of the Spahis; scarlet cloak and full trousers; the beautiful pale blue of the Chasseurs d'Afrique, and a plainer uniform which Max guessed to be that of the Foreign Legion. The boxer had his committee de réception also; a dozen or more dark, fat, loud-talking proprietors of cafés, or tradefolk keen on "le sport." These, and the lounging Arabs, might have interested strangers to Sidi-bel-Abbés, if there had been nothing better worth attention. But owing to the lateness of the train, it had come in almost simultaneously with another made up of windowless wagons for men, horses or freight, which had not yet discharged its load. Out from the wide doorway of the long car labelled "32 hommes, 6 chevaux," was streaming an extraordinary procession; tall, bearded men with the high cheek-bones and sad, wide-apart eyes of the Slav: a blond, round-cheeked boy whose shy yet stolid face could only have been bred in Germany, or Alsace; sharp-featured, rat-eyed fellows who might have been collected at Montmartre or in a Marseilles slum; others who were nondescripts of no complexion and no expression; waifs from anywhere; a brown-skinned Spaniard and an Italian or two; a Negro with the sophisticated look of a New York "darkee"; a melancholy, hooded Arab, and a fierce-faced Moor; types utterly at variance, yet with one likeness which bound them together like a convict's chain: weariness and stains of long, hard travelling, which thrust the few well-dressed men down to the level of the shabbiest. Some were almost middle aged; some were youths hardly yet at the regulation enlistment age of eighteen; a few one might take for broken-down gentlemen; more who looked like workmen out of a job, and one or two unmistakably old soldiers, eager-eyed as lost dogs who had found their way home: a strange gathering of individuals to find stumbling out of a freight train at a country station of a French colony; but this was Sidi-bel-Abbés, headquarters of La Legion Etrangére: and as the tired, dirty men tumbled out on to the platform, everybody stared openly as a corporal with a high képi, a buttoned-back blue overcoat, and loose, red trousers tucked into military boots, formed the crew into lines of four.

Even the officers at the end of the platform gazed at the soiled scarecrows who had to be made into soldiers: for this being Sidi-bel-Abbés, there was no difficulty in guessing that the twenty-eight or thirty men of six or seven nations were recruits of the Legion of Foreigners. The draggled throng was quietly indicated to the visitor in civilian clothes, who nodded appreciatively and then turned away. But the boxer's brigade explained the unfortunate wretches so loudly and unflatteringly to their guest that haggard faces flushed and quivering lips stiffened; while at the gateway of exit, a motionless row of non-commissioned officers, watching for deserters, regarded "les bleus" critically, yet indifferently.

Max, whose quick imagination made him almost painfully sensitive for others, felt hot and sorry for the men herded together by misfortune. He had read sensational stories of the Foreign Legion, and found himself hypnotized into looking for brutal jowls of escaped murderers, or faces of pallid aristocrats in torn evening clothes, splashed with blood. Among these men of mystery or sorrow there were, however, few startling types which caught the eye. But one man—young, tall, straight as an arrow—running the gauntlet of jokes and stares with fierce, repressed defiance, turned suddenly to look at Max and Sanda.

Where to place him in life, Max could not tell. He might be prince or peasant by birth, since prince and peasant are akin at heart, and ever remote from the middle-classes as from Martians. He wore a soft, gray felt hat, smeared with coal-dust from the engine. The collar of his dusty black overcoat was turned up; it actually looked like an evening coat. His trousers were black too, and Max had an impression of patent leather shoes glittering through dust. But these details were only accessories to the picture, and interesting because of the wearer's face. It was dark as that of a Spaniard from Andalusia, with the high, proud features of an Indian. It had been clean-shaven a few days ago; and from two haggard hollows a pair of wild black eyes flashed one glance at Max—the only man who had not seemed to stare. Face and look were unforgettable. It seemed to Max that some appeal had been flung to him. He could hardly keep himself from striding after the tall figure, to ask: "What is it you want me to do?" And Sanda also had been impressed. He heard her murmur under her breath, "Poor man! What wonderful eyes!"

Nobody moved from the platform until the corporal had called the roll of names—German, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Arab—and had marched his batch of recruits briskly through the guarded gate. Max would have hurried Sanda out directly behind them, before the crowd could secure all the queer, old-fashioned cabs which were waiting, but at that moment the smart group of officers moved forward. Having shown their guest one of the sights of Sidi-bel-Abbés, they evidently expected to take precedence of the townspeople, who gave no sign of disputing their right. Max, following the example of others and resisting an impulse to salute, stood back with his companion to let the uniforms pass. Sanda, pink with excitement, was as usual all unconscious of self, and vividly interested both in recruits and officers. The latter, especially the young ones, were equally interested in the pretty, well-dressed girl, a stranger in Sidi-bel-Abbés and the one woman on the platform.

Max saw the polite but admiring glances, and would have liked to draw her further away. He bent down to whisper a suggestion, but Sanda did not hear. Her face, her whole personality, had undergone one of those swift changes characteristic of her.

With a fluttering cry, she started forward, then stepped nervously back, and, stumbling against Max's foot, would have fallen if he had not caught her.

All his attention was for her, yet, with his eyes on the girl, he suddenly became conscious that something had happened among the officers. One man had stopped abruptly just in front of Sanda, while others were going through the gate, hurrying on as if tactfully desirous to get themselves out of the way. A voice murmured "Mon Dieu!" and having steadied Sanda, Max saw standing close to them a small, rather dapper man with a lined brown face, a very square, smooth-shaven jaw, long gray eyes, short gray hair, and the neat slimness of a West Point cadet. He had on his sleeve the five gold stripes signifying a colonel's rank, and was decorated with several medals.

Instantly Max understood the situation. The one thing that ought not to have happened, had happened.

THE COLONEL OF THE LEGION

All Sanda's anxiously laid plans were swept away in the wind of emotion. She and the father she had meant to win with loving diplomacy had stumbled upon each other crudely in a railway station. The dear resemblance upon which she had founded her best hope had struck Colonel DeLisle like a blow over the heart.

The dapper little officer, with the figure of a boy and the face of a tragic mask, stared straight at the girl, with the look of one who meets a ghost in daylight. "My God! who are you?" he faltered, in French. The words seemed to speak themselves against his will.

Sanda was deathly pale. But she caught at her courage as a soldier grasps his flag: "I am—Corisande, your daughter," she answered in that small, sweet voice of a child with which she had begged Max to pardon her, yesterday. And she too spoke in French. "My father, forgive me if I've done wrong to come to you like this. But I was so unhappy. I wanted so much to see you. And I've travelled such a long way!"

For an instant the man still stared at her in silence. He had the air of listening for a voice within a voice, as one listens through the sound of running water for its tune. Max, who must now unfortunately be explained and accounted for in spite of every difficulty, found a strange likeness between the middle-aged soldier and the young girl. It was in the eyes: long, gray, haunted with thoughts and dreams. If Sanda DeLisle ever had to become acquainted with sorrow her eyes would be like her father's.

The pause was but for a second or two, though it was full of suspense for the girl, and even for Max, who forgot himself in anxiety for her. The hardness of straining after self-control melted to sudden beauty, as Max had seen Sanda's face transfigured. Never again, it seemed to him—no matter what Colonel DeLisle's actions might be—could he believe him to be cruel or cold.

"Ma petite," DeLisle said, with a quiver in his voice that echoed up from heartstrings swept by some spirit hand. "Can it be true? You have come—across half the world, to me?"

"Oh, father, yes, it is true. And always I've wanted to come." Sanda's voice caressed him. No man could have resisted her then. "You're not angry?"

"Mon Dieu, no, I'm not angry, though my life is not the life for a girl. I only—for a moment I thought I saw——"

"I know, I guessed," Sanda gently filled up his pause. "Since I began growing into a woman every one told me I was like—her. But I wouldn't send you a photograph. For years I've planned to surprise you—and make you care a little, if I could."

"Care!" he echoed, a look as of anguish passing over his face like the shadow of a cloud; then leaving it clear, though sad with the habitual sadness which had scored its many lines. "You have surprised me, indeed. But——" He stopped abruptly, and apparently for the first time noticed the young man standing near. Stiffening slightly, Colonel DeLisle looked keenly at Max, his eyes trying to solve the new puzzle. "But—my daughter, you have come to me with——"

"Only a friend," Sanda broke in desperately, blushing up to her bright hair. "A kind friend, Mr. Doran, an American who had to travel to Sidi-bel-Abbés on business of his own, and who's been more good to me than I can describe. I want him to let me tell you all about him, and then you will understand."

"I thank you in advance, Monsieur," said Colonel DeLisle, unbending again, and a faint—a very faint—twinkle brightening his eyes, at the thought of the error he had nearly made, and because of Doran's blush at being mistaken for an unwelcome son-in-law.

"I've done nothing, Monsieur le Colonel," stammered Max. "I had to come. I have business with a person at the Hotel Splendide. It is Mademoiselle who is kind to me in saying——"

"Could he not take me to the hotel to wait for you?" Sanda cut in. "I shouldn't have interrupted you in such a place as this, and at such a time, my father, if I could have helped doing so, even though I recognized your face from the old photograph that is my treasure. But acting on impulse is my greatest fault, the aunts all say. And when I saw you I cried out before I stopped to think. Then I drew back, but it was too late. I have taken you from some duty."

"I came officially with my comrades to meet General Sauvanne, who is visiting our Algerian garrisons," said DeLisle. He glanced again at Max, giving him one of those soldier looks which long experience has taught to penetrate flesh and bone and brain down to a man's hidden self. "It is true that I have no right to excuse myself for my own private affairs." He hesitated, almost imperceptibly, then turned to Max. "Add to your past kindness by taking my daughter to the hotel, Monsieur, where in my name she will engage a room for herself—since, unfortunately, I have no home to offer her. I will go with you both to a cab, and then return to duty. My child, I will see you again before dejeuner."

Max's quick mind promptly comprehended the full meaning of Colonel DeLisle's seemingly unconventional decision. Not only was he being made friendly use of, in a complicated situation, but Sanda's father wished all who had seen the girl arrive with a man to know once for all that the man had his official approval. Soon Sanda's relationship to the Colonel of the First Regiment of the Foreign Legion would be known, and there must be no stupid gossip regarding the scene at the station. As they passed the other officers and their guests (who for these few dramatic moments had discreetly awaited developments, outside the platform gate), Colonel DeLisle lingered an instant to murmur; "It is my daughter, who has come unexpectedly. A young friend whom I can trust to see her to the hotel will take her there, and I am at your service when I have put them into a cab."

"What do you think?" cried Sanda, as the rickety vehicle rattled them toward the nearest gate of the walled town. "Have I failed with him—or have I succeeded?"

"Succeeded," Max answered. "Don't you feel it?"

"I hoped it. Oh, Mr. Doran, I am going to love him!"

"I don't wonder," Max said. "I'm sure he's worth it."

"Yet I saw by your look when I spoke of him before, that you were thinking him heartless."

"I had no right to think anything."

"I gave you the right, by confiding in you. But I didn't confide enough, to do my father justice. I knew he wasn't heartless, though he couldn't bear the sight of me when I was a baby, and put me out of his life. He has always said that a soldier's life was not for a young girl to share. I knew he had a heart, because of that, not in spite of it. It was that he loved my mother so desperately, and I'd robbed him of her. Now you've seen him, you must let me tell you a little——"

"Would he wish it?"

"Yes, if he knew why, and if he knew you, and what you are going through at this time. He fell in love with my mother at first sight in Paris, and she with him. He was on leave, and she was there with her parents from Ireland. He'd never meant to marry, but he was swept off his feet. Mother's people wouldn't hear of it. They took her home in a hurry, and tried to make her marry some one else. She nearly did—because they were stronger than she. She wrote father a letter of good-bye, to his post in the southern desert, where he was stationed then. He supposed, when he read the letter, that she was already married when he got it. But suddenly she appeared—as unexpectedly as I appeared to-day. She'd run away from home, because she couldn't live without him. Oh, how well I understand her! Think of the joy! It was like waking from a dreadful dream for both of them. They were going to be married at once, though mother was half dead with fatigue and excitement after her long, hurried journey; but on their wedding eve she was taken ill, and became delirious. It was typhoid fever. She had got it somehow on the journey. She had come without stopping to rest, from Dublin to Touggourt, where father was stationed. They say it's wild there even now. It was far wilder then, more than twenty-one years ago. He nursed mother himself, scarcely eating or sleeping: not taking off his clothes for weeks. One of his aunts—my great-aunt—told me the story. It came to her from a friend of father's. He never spoke of it. For three months mother wasn't out of danger. Father was her nurse, her doctor, not her husband. But at last she was well again. They had their honeymoon in a tent in the desert. She loved the desert, then—or thought she did. Afterward, though, she changed, for I was coming, and she was ill again. By that time they were stationed still farther south. She grew so homesick for the north that my father got leave. They started to travel by easy stages through the desert, with a small caravan. Their hope was to reach Algiers, and to get to France long before the baby should come; but the heat grew suddenly terrible, and one day they were caught in a fearful sandstorm. My mother was terrified. I was born two months before the time. That same night she died, while the storm was still raging; and before she went, she begged my father to promise, whatever happened, not to leave her body buried in the desert. He did promise. And then began his martyrdom. The caravan could not march fast because of me. A negro woman who'd come as mother's maid took care of me as well as she could, and fed me on condensed milk. Strange I should have lived.... My father had his men make for my mother's body a case of many tins, which they spread open and soldered together, with lead from bullets they melted. In the next oasis they cut down a palm tree and hollowed out the trunk for a coffin. They sealed up the tin case in it, and the coffin travelled on the camel mother had ridden when she was alive, in one of those beautiful hooded bassourahs you must have seen in pictures. At night the coffin rested in my father's tent, and he lay beside it as he had lain beside my mother when she lived, and they were happy. Because she'd been a Catholic, and because she'd always hated the dark, father burned candles on the coffin always till dawn; and the men who loved him looked for wild flowers in the desert to lay upon it. He had forty days, and forty nights, marching through the desert with the dead body of his love, before they came to the railway. Then he took mother to France, and left me with his two aunts there. Now do you wonder he never loved me, or wanted to have me with him?"

"No, perhaps not," said Max. Deep sadness had fallen upon him. He was in the desert with the man beside whose agony his own trial was as nothing. All the world seemed to be full of sorrow and pain sharper than his own personal pain. And as the girl asked her question and he answered it, their cab passed the procession of recruits for the Foreign Legion, tramping along between tall plane trees toward the town gate.

Once again a pair of tortured black eyes looked at Max, who winced as the thick yellow dust from the wheels enveloped the marching men.

"Will you let me tell my father your story, as I have told you his?" Sanda asked.

"Do as you think best," he said.

In another moment the cab had rolled past a few gardens and villas, a green plateau and a moat, and passed through a great gateway. Overhead, carved in the stone, were the words "Porte d'Oran," and the date, 1855. Once, when the town was young, the gates had been kept tightly closed, and through the loopholes in the stout, stone wall (the old part yellow, the newer part gray) guns had been fired at besieging Arabs, the tribe of the Beni Amer, who had worshipped at the shrine of the dead Saint, Sidi-bel-Abbés. But all that was past long ago. No hope of fighting for the Legionnaires, save over the frontier in Morocco, or far away in the South! The shrine of Sidi-bel-Abbés stood neglected in the Arab graveyard. Even the meaning of the name, once sacred to his followers, was well-nigh forgotten; and all that was Arab in Sidi-bel-Abbés had been relegated to the Village Négre, strictly forbidden as Blue Beard's Room of Secrets, to the Soldiers of the Legion.

Inside the wall everything was modern and French, except for a few trudging or labouring Arabs in white, or in gray burnouses of camel's hair made in Morocco. As the daughter of the Legion's colonel drove humbly in her shabby cab to the Hotel Splendide, she felt vaguely depressed and disappointed in the town which she expected to be her home. She had fancied that it would be very eastern, with mosques and bazaars, and perhaps surrounded with desert; but there was no desert within many miles; and there was only one minaret rising in the distance, like a long white finger to mark the beginning of the Village Négre. Instead of bazaars, there were new French shops and a sinister predominance of drinking places of all sorts: a few "smart" cafés, with marble-topped tables on the pavement, but mostly dull dens, appealing to the poorest and most desperate. The town was like a Maltese cross in shape, the arms of the cross being wide streets, each leading to a gate in the fortifications; Porte d'Oran, Porte de Tlemcen, Porte de Mascarra, and Porte de Daya; and the one great charm of the place seemed to be in its trees; giant planes which made arbours across the streets, giving a look of dreaming peace, despite the rattle of wheels on roughly set paving-stones.

There were middle-aged buildings, low and small and dun-coloured, exactly like those of every other French-Algerian settlement, but big new blocks of glittering white gave an air of almost ostentatious prosperity to the place. There was even an attempt at gayety in the ornamentation, yet there appeared to be nothing attractive to tourists, save the Foreign Legion, which gave mystery and romance to all that would otherwise have been banal. Noise was everywhere, loud, shrill, insistent; rumbling, shrieking, rattling, roaring. Huge wagons, loaded with purple-stained cases of Algerian wine, bumping over the stones; strings of bells wound round the great horns of horses' collars jingling like sleigh-bells in winter; whips in the hands of fierce-eyed carters cracking round the heads of large, sad mules; hooters of automobiles and immense motor diligences blaring; men shouting at animals; animals barking or braying, snorting or clucking at men; unseen soldiers marching to music; a town clock sweetly chiming the hour, and, above all, rising like spray from the ocean of din, high voices of Arabs chaffering, disputing, arguing. This was the "Arabian Night's Paradise" that Sanda had dreamed of!

Presently the cab passed a great town clock with four faces (one for each of the four diverging streets) and drew up before a flat-faced building with the name "Hotel Splendide" stretching across its dim, yellow front. Inside a big, open doorway, stairs went steeply up, past piles of commercial travellers' show trunks, and an Arab bootblack who clamoured for custom. At the top Max Doran and his charge came into a hall, whence a bare-looking restaurant and several other rooms opened out. On a gigantic hatrack like a withered tree hung coats and hats in dark bunches, brightened with a few military coats and gold-braided caps. As Max and Sanda appeared, an officer—youngish, dark, sharp-featured, with a small waxed moustache and near-sighted black eyes—turned hastily away from a window, and with a stride added his cap and cloak to the hatrack's burden. He had an almost childishly guilty air of not wishing to be caught at something. And what that something was, Max Doran guessed with a queer constriction of the throat as he looked through the window. This opened into a dim room, which was labelled "Bureau," and framed the head and bust of a young woman.

Such light as there was in the hall fell full upon her short, white face, into her slanting yellow eyes and on to the elaborately dressed red hair. She had been smiling at the officer, but on the interruption of the strangers' entrance she frowned with annoyance. It was the frank, animal annoyance of a beautiful young lynx, teased by having a piece of meat snatched away. The eyes were clear in colour as a dark topaz, and full of topaz light. This was remarkable; but their real strangeness lay in expression. They seemed not unintelligent, but devoid of all human experience. They gazed at the newcomers from the little window of the bureau, as an animal gazes from the bars of its cage, looking at the eyes which regard it, not into them; near yet remote; a creature of another species.

The girl appeared to be well-shaped enough, though her strong white throat was short, and the hands which lay on the wide window ledge were as small as a child's. Yet like a shadow thrown on the wall behind her was a lurking impression of deformity of body and mind, a spirit cast out of her, to point at something veiled. If there could have lingered in the mind of Max a grain of doubt concerning Rose Doran's confession, it was burnt up in a moment; for the girl was an Aubrey Beardsley caricature of Rose. No need to ask if this were Mademoiselle Delatour. He knew. And this lieutenant in the uniform of the Spahis was the "namesake" of whom the men had talked in the train.

THE VOICE OF THE LEGION

It was all far worse even than Max had expected; and the next few days were a nightmare. The resemblance between the girl and her mother—once his mother, whom he had as a boy adored—made the effect more gruesome.

Josephine Delatour was coarse minded and sly, inordinately vain, caring for nothing in life except the admiration of such men as she had met and mistaken for gentlemen. Her way of receiving the news of her change of fortune disgusted Max, sickened him so utterly that he could not bear to think of her reigning in Jack Doran's house. She was torn between pleasure in the prospect of being rich, and suspicious that there was a plot to kidnap her, like the heroine of a sensational novel. She did not want to go to America. She wanted to stay in Sidi-bel-Abbés and triumph over all the women who had snubbed her. She boasted of her admirers, and hinted that even without money she could marry any one of a dozen young officers. But the one for whom she seemed really to care—if it were in her to care for any one except herself—was the namesake of whom Max had heard laughing hints.

At the time it had not occurred to him that the name of the alleged "cousin" must be Delatour; but so it was though the dark young man with the waxed moustache spelled his name differently, in the more aristocratic way, with three syllables. When Josephine boasted that, though he was from a great family, with a castle on the River Loire, he called himself her cousin, Max realized that the Lieutenant of Spahis must be a son or nephew of the de la Tour from whom Rose and Jack had taken the château. So far, however, was Max Doran from being elated by this tie of blood, that he mentally dubbed his relative a cad. It was all he could do to persuade Josephine not to tell Raoul de la Tour that she had come into money, and a name as aristocratic as his own—in fact, that she was qualifying as a heroine of romance. Only by appealing to the crude sense of drama the girl had in her could she be prevented from stupidly throwing out bait to fortune-hunters. But having wired again to Edwin Reeves, and hearing that Mrs. Reeves, already in Paris, had started for Algiers, a plan occurred to Max. He advised Josephine, if she thought that de la Tour cared for her, to tell him that she was giving up work in the Hotel Splendide; also that she was leaving Sidi-bel-Abbés forever; and then see what he would say. What he did say was such a blow to the girl's vanity that, when she was sure he had no intention of marrying a poor secretary, she flung the dazzling truth at his face. Repentant, he tried to turn his late insults into honest lovemaking; but the temper of the lynx was roused. Never having deeply loved the man, she took pleasure in using her claws on him. In taunting him with what he might have had, however, she let the identity of the newsbringer leak out.

De la Tour then warned her passionately against le jeune aventurier Americain, and almost frightened the girl into disbelieving the whole story. But proofs were forthcoming, and with the landlord's wife, who enjoyed sharing a borrowed halo, Josephine Delatour—or Josephine Doran—went to Algiers to await Mrs. Reeves's arrival. Meanwhile, with the money she procured from Max, the girl planned to buy herself a trousseau, and eventually departed, rejoicing in her lover's discomfiture. Whether or no this attitude were safe with such a man remained to be seen. As for Max—the messenger who had brought the tidings—since he showed no desire to flirt with her, Josephine saw no reason to be interested in him. Besides, she could hardly believe that he was not somehow to blame for having kept what ought to have been hers for his own all these years. She had not loved her supposed father and mother, who had interfered with her pleasure, disapproving of what they called her extravagance and frivolity.... There was no grief to the girl in learning that the Delatours were not her parents.

Nor did it seem to Josephine that gratitude was due Max for resigning in her favour. She was greedily ready to grab everything, without thanks, just as her lynx-prototype would snatch a piece of meat, if it could get it, from another lynx. She grudged the years of luxury and pleasure which she ought to have had; and could she have realized that she had made of Lieutenant de la Tour an enemy for Max Doran, she would have been glad. It was right that two men should quarrel over a woman.

While he was arranging Josephine's affairs, Max saw nothing of Sanda and Colonel DeLisle. He had thought it best to take up his quarters at another hotel, and his only communication with them was by letter. He wrote Sanda that when his business was finished he would make up his mind what to do; but in any case he hoped that he might be allowed to bid her and Colonel DeLisle farewell. In answer, came an invitation from the Colonel to see the Salle d'Honneur of the Legion, the famous gallery where records of its heroes were kept. "That is," (Sanda said, writing for her father) "if you are interested in the Legion."

"If he were interested in the Legion!" Already he was obsessed by thoughts of it. Sidi-bel-Abbés, which at first had struck him as being a dull provincial town, now seemed the only place where he could have lived through his dark hours. Elsewhere he would have felt surrounded by a gay and happy world in which a man with his back to the wall had no place. Here at Sidi-bel-Abbés was the home of men with their backs to the wall. The very town itself had been created by such men, and for them. For generations desperate men, sad men, starving men, of all countries—men who had lost everything but life and strength—had been turning their faces toward Sidi-bel-Abbés, their sole luggage the secret sorrow which, once the Legion had taken them, was no one's business but their own.

Max Doran could not go into the street without meeting at least a dozen men in the Legion's uniform, who seemed akin to him because of the look in their eyes; the look of those cut off from what had once meant life and love. What they were enduring was unknown to him, but he was somehow at home among them. And the day Josephine went away, before he had yet made up his mind to the next step, for the first time he heard the music of the Legion's band.

It was in the afternoon, and he had strolled outside the Porte de Tlemcen into the public gardens for the music, only because he had an hour to pass before his appointment in the Salle d'Honneur. In winter the band played in the Place Carnot, but on this soft day of early spring the concert was announced for the gardens beloved by the people of Sidi-bel-Abbés. They were beautiful, but to Max it seemed the beauty of sadness; and even there, outside the wall which dead Legionnaires had built, everything spoke of the Legion. Men of the Legion had planted many of the tall trees of the cloistral avenue, whose columnar trunks were darkly draped with ivy. Men of the Legion swept dead leaves from the paths, as they swept away old memories. Men of the Legion walked in the gray shadow of the planes, as they walked in the shadows of life. Men of the Legion rested on the rough wooden benches, staring absently at mourning plumes of cypresses, or white waterfalls that fleeted by like lost opportunities. Yes, despite the flowers in the myrtle borders it was a place of sadness, and of a mournful silence until the musicians brought their instruments into the curious bandstand formed of growing trees. Then it seemed to Max that he heard the Legion speak in a great and wonderful voice.

As by studying a hive one feels the mysterious governing spirit, so he felt the spirit of the Legion in its music, its restlessness, its longings, its passions, and its ambitions, uttered and cried to heaven in prayers and curses. As individuals the men were dumb, guarding their secrets, striving to forget; and it was as if this smothered fire, seeking outlet, had sprung from heart to heart, kindling and massing all together in a vast, white-hot furnace. The music opened the doors of this furnace, and the flames roared upward to the sky. In the dazzling light of that strange fire, secrets could be read, if the eyes that saw were not blinded. Bitterness and joy were there to see, and the blending of all passions through which men ruin their lives, and need to remake their souls. Yes, that was the Legion's call. Men came to it, in the hope of remaking their souls. With his own drowned in the music of pain and regeneration, Max went to the Salle d'Honneur to meet Colonel DeLisle.

He knew where to find it, next to the barracks; a small, low building of the same dull yellow, set back in a little garden with a few palms and flowerbeds. Inside the gate was a red, blue, and white sentry box. But Max entered unchallenged, because at the door of the house stood the colonel, who came down a step to meet him. "Monsieur Doran!" he exclaimed cordially, holding out his hand.

"Will you still offer me your hand, sir," Max asked wistfully, though he smiled, "even if I've no name any more, and no country that I can claim? Mademoiselle DeLisle has told you?"

"She has told me," echoed the elder man, shaking the younger's hand with extra warmth. "I congratulate you on the chance of making a name for yourself. I think from what I hear, and can judge, that you will do so, in whatever path you choose. Have you chosen yet?"

"Not yet," Max confessed. "Neither a name nor the way to make it. Nor the country most likely to make it in."

"As for that"—and Colonel DeLisle smiled—"we of the Legion are more used to men without names and without countries than to those who have them. Not that your case is allied to theirs. Shall we go in? I want to thank you, as I've not been able to do yet, for your chivalrous behaviour to my daughter. She has told me all about that, too—all. And I had a feeling that this room, in which our Legion commemorates honourable deeds, would be a place where you and I might talk."

As he spoke he led Max into a short corridor, at the end of which hung a large frame containing portraits and many names of men and battles with the crest of la Legion Etrangére at the top. Pushing open a door at the right, DeLisle made way for his guest. "Here are all the relics that are to us men of the First Regiment most sacred," he said. And as he passed in, he saluted a flag preciously guarded in a long glass case: the flag of the regiment decorated with the Cross of the Legion of Honour on an historic occasion of great bravery. An answering thrill shot through Max's veins, for in them ran soldier blood. Involuntarily he, too, saluted the flag and its cross. Colonel DeLisle gave him a quick look, but made no comment.

Two out of the four walls were covered with portraits of men in uniforms ancient and modern; paintings, engravings, photographs; and the decorations were strange weapons, and torn, faded banners which had helped the Legion to make history. There were drums and weird idols, too, and monstrous masks and great fans from Tonkin and Madagascar, and relics of fighting in Mexico. On the long table lay albums of photographs, and upon either side were ranged chairs as if for officers to sit in council.

"Whenever we wish to do a guest honour, we bring him here," said the colonel. "We are not rich, and have nothing better to offer; except, perhaps, our music."

"I have already heard the music," answered Max. "I shall never forget it. And I shall never forget this room."

"Such music wakes the hearts of men, and helps inspire them to heroic acts like these." Colonel DeLisle waved his hand toward some of the pictures which showed soldiers fighting the Legion's most historic battles. "I am rather proud of our music and our men. This room, too, and the things in it—most of all the flag. My daughter has spent hours in the Salle d'Honneur looking over our records. Presently she will join us. But I wanted to thank you before she came. Corisande is a child, knowing little of the world and its ways. Some men in your place would have misunderstood her—in the unusual circumstances. But you did not. You proved yourself a friend in need for my little girl, on her strange journey to me. I wish in return there might be some way in which I could show myself a friend to you. Can you think of any such way?"

The voice was earnest and very kind. A great reaction from his first prejudice against the speaker swept over Max. Beneath this one voice which questioned him and waited for an answer, he heard as a deep, thrilling undertone the voice of the Legion which had called to him through the music to come and share its bath of fire. A sudden purpose awoke in Max Doran, and he knew then that it had been in the background of his mind for days, waiting for some word to wake it. Now the word had come. All his blood seemed to rush from heart to head, and he grew giddy: yet he spoke steadily enough.

"I have thought of a way, Colonel DeLisle!"

"I am glad. You have only to tell me."

"Accept me as one of your men. Let me join the Legion."

"Mon Dieu!" The Legion's colonel was taken completely by surprise. Max had thought he might perhaps have expected the request, but evidently it was not so. The dapper little figure straightened itself. And from his place beside his adored flag, Colonel DeLisle gazed across to the other side where, close also to the flag, stood the young man he had wished to serve. Max met his eyes, flushed and eager and, it seemed, pathetically young. There was dead silence for an instant. Then DeLisle spoke in a changed tone: "Do you mean this? Have you thought of what you are saying?"

"I do mean it," Max replied. "I believe I have thought of it ever since I saw those men of all countries getting out of the train to join the Legion. I felt the call they had felt. But it is stronger to-day. I know now what I want. In the Salle D'Honneur of the Legion I decide on my career."

"Decide!" the other repeated. "No, not that, yet! You have got this idea into your head because you are romantic. You think you are ruined and that the future doesn't matter. You will find it does. This is no place for poetry and romance—my God, no! It's a fiery furnace. In barracks we should burn the romance out of you in twenty-four hours."

"If I've got more in me than any man who loves adventure ought to have, then I want it burned out," said Max.

"Adventures will cost you less elsewhere," almost sneered DeLisle.

"I don't ask to get them cheap," Max still insisted. "Though I've got nothing to pay with, except myself, my blood, and flesh, and muscles."

"That's good coin," exclaimed the elder, warming again. "Yet we can't take it. You may think you know what you mean. But you don't know what the Legion means. I do. I've had nearly twenty years of it."

"You love it?"

"Yes, it is my life. But—I have to remind you, I entered it as an officer. There is all the difference."

"At least I should be a soldier. I know what a soldier's hardships are."

"Ah, not in the Legion!"

"It can't kill me."

"It might."

"Let it, then. I'll die learning to be a man."

DeLisle looked at his companion intently. "I think," he said, "you are a man."

"No, sir, I'm not," Max contradicted him abruptly. "I used to hope I might pass muster as men go. But these last days I've been finding myself out. I've been down in hell, and I shouldn't have got there if I were a man. I'm a self-indulgent, pining, and whining boy, thinking of nothing but myself, and not knowing whether I've done right or wrong. If the Legion can't teach me what's white and what's black, nothing can."

The colonel of the Legion laughed a queer, short laugh. "That is true," he said. "I take back those words of mine about poetry and romance. You've got the right point of view, after all. And you are the kind of man the Legion wants, the born soldier, lover of adventure for adventure's sake. You would come to us not because you have anything to hide, or because you prefer barracks in France to prison at home, or because some woman has thrown you over," (just there his keen eyes saw the young man wince, and he hurried on without a pause) "but because we've made some history, we of the Legion, and you would like a chance to make some for yourself, under this"—and he pointed to the flag whose folds hung between them—"Valeur et Discipline! That's the Legion's motto, for the Legion itself must be Dieu et Patrie for most of its sons. I've done my duty as a friend in warning you to go where life is easier. As colonel of the First Regiment, I welcome you, if you sincerely wish to come into the Legion. Only——"

"Only what, sir?"

"My daughter! She wanted me to help you. She'll think I've hindered, instead."

"No, Colonel. She hoped I'd join the Legion."

DeLisle looked surprised. "What reason have you for supposing that?"

"Interpreting a thing she said, or, rather, a thing she wanted to say, but was afraid to say for fear I might blame her some day in the future."

"She, knowing nothing of the Legion, recommended you to join? That is strange."

"She knew a little of me and my circumstances. I'd been a soldier, and there seemed only one convenient way for a man without a name or country to start and become a soldier again. Miss DeLisle saw that."

"You're talking of me?" inquired Sanda's voice at the half-open door. Both men sprang to open it for her. As she came into the Salle d'Honneur, she seemed to bring with her into this room, sacred to dead heroes of all lands, the sweetness of spring flowers to lay on distant graves. And as she stepped over the threshold, like a young soldier she saluted the flag.

"I have just said to Colonel DeLisle that you would approve of my joining the Legion," Max explained. "Have I told him the truth?"

The girl looked anxiously from one man to the other. She was rather pale and subdued, as if life pressed hardly even upon her. "You guessed what I wouldn't let myself say in the train the other day!" she exclaimed. "But—you haven't joined, have you?"

"Not yet, or I shouldn't be here. The Salle d'Honneur is for common soldiers only when they're dead, I presume."

"But you could become an officer some day, couldn't he, father?"

"Yes," replied Colonel DeLisle. "Every soldier of the Legion has his chance. And our friend is French, I think, from what you've told me of his confidences to you. That gives an extra chance to rise. France—rightly or wrongly, but like all mothers—favours her own sons. Besides, he has been a soldier, which puts him at once ahead of the others."

"I shouldn't trade on that! I'd rather begin on a level with other men, not ahead of them," Max said hastily. "My object would be not to teach, but to learn—to cure myself of my faults——"

The colonel drew a deep breath, like a sigh. "We do cure men sometimes, men far more desperate, men with souls far more sick than yours. There's that to be said for us."

"His soul isn't sick at all!" Sanda cried out, in defence of her friend.

"Perhaps he thinks it is." Colonel DeLisle looked at Max as he had looked after those chance words of his about a woman.

"Do you think that, Mr. Doran?" the girl questioned incredulously. "I shall be disappointed if you do."

"Don't be disappointed. I do not think my soul is sick. I want to see how strong it can be, and my body, too. But you mustn't call me 'Mr. Doran' now, please. It isn't my name any more. Colonel DeLisle, may I ask your daughter to choose a name for a new soldier of the Legion? It will be the last favour, for I understand perfectly that after I've joined the regiment, as a private soldier, you can be my friends only at heart. Socially, all intercourse must end."

"Oh, no, it wouldn't be so," Sanda cried out impulsively, though the old officer was silent. "It wouldn't, if I were not going away."

"You are going away?" Max was conscious of a faint chill. He would have found some comfort in the thought that his brave little travelling companion was near, even though he seldom saw and never spoke to her.

"Not home to the aunts! I told you I'd never go back to live with them, and my father wouldn't send me. But there's to be a long march—— Oh, have I said what I oughtn't? Why? Since he must know if he joins? Anyhow, I can't stay here many days longer—I mean, for the present. I'm to be sent to a wonderful place. It will be a great romance."

"Sanda, it is irrelevant to talk of that now," Colonel DeLisle reminded his daughter.

"Forgive me! I forgot, father. May I—name the new soldier, and wish him joy?"

DeLisle laughed rather bitterly. "'Joy' isn't precisely the word. If he hoped for it, he would soon be disillusioned. You may give him a name, if he wishes it. But let me also give him a few words of advice. Monsieur Doran——"

"St. George!" broke in Sanda. "That is to be his name. I christen him, close to the flag. Soldier, saint, slayer of dragons." She did not add "my patron saint," but Max remembered, and was grateful.

"Soldier Saint George, then," DeLisle began again, smiling, "this is my advice as your friend and well-wisher: again, I say, why should you not take advantages you have fairly earned? My men are wonderful soldiers. I suppose in the world there can be none braver, few so brave; for they nearly all come to heal or hide some secret wound that makes them desperate or careless of life. They are glorious soldiers, these foreigners of ours! But at the beginning you will see them at their worst in the dulness of barrack life. There are all sorts and conditions, from the lowest to the highest. You may happen to be among some of the lowest. Why not start where you are entitled to start? When, in being recruited, you are asked to state your profession, you're at liberty to say what you choose. No statement as to name, age, country, or occupation is disputed in the Legion. But once more, let me advise you, if you write yourself down "Soldier," things can be made comparatively easy for you."

"I thank you, sir, and I will take your advice in everything else. But I don't want things made easy."

"You may regret your obstinacy."

"Oh, father," pleaded Sanda, "wouldn't you be the very one to do the same thing?"

"In his place," said Colonel DeLisle, shrugging his shoulders, "I suppose I should do what he does. What I might do, isn't the question, however. But I've said enough.... Now I have to get back to barracks. For you, Sanda, this must be 'good-bye,' I fear, to the friend of your journey."

"My friend for always," the girl amended, holding out her hand to Max. "And I'd rather say 'Au revoir' than 'Good-bye'; we shall meet again—away in the desert, perhaps."

She caught her father's warning eye and stopped. "Good-bye, then—Soldier of the Legion."

"If he doesn't change his mind," muttered DeLisle. "There's still time."

Max looked from the girl to the flag in its glass case.

"I shall not change my mind," he said.

FOUR EYES

Beyond the barracks of the Legion, going toward the Porte de Tlemcen, and opposite the drill-ground and cavalry barracks of the Spahis, there is a sign: Bureau de Recrutement.

Early in the morning after taking his resolution, Max walked down the narrow, lane-like way which led off from the Rue de Tlemcen and the long front wall of the Legion's barracks, and found the door indicated by the sign.

In a bare office room, furnished with a table and a few benches, sat a corporal, busily writing. He looked up, surprised to see such a visitor as Max, and was at some trouble to hide his amazement on hearing that this well-dressed young man, evidently a gentleman, wished to enlist in the Legion. Opening off the outer room, with its white-washed walls and display of posters tempting to recruits, was another office, the Bureau du Commandant de Recrutement, and there Max was received by a lieutenant, older than most of the men of that rank in the English or American armies. Something in his manner made Max wonder if the officer had been told of him and his intention by Colonel DeLisle. At first he put only the perfunctory questions which a man entering the wide-open gate of the Legion may answer as he chooses. But when in its turn came an inquiry as to the recruit's profession, the officer looked at Max sharply yet with sympathy.

"No profession," was the answer; a true one, for Max's resignation had already taken effect.

"At present, but—in the past?" the lieutenant encouraged him kindly. "If you have military experience, you can rise quickly in the Legion."

For good or ill, Max stuck to yesterday's resolve, knowing that he might be weak enough to regret it, and anxious therefore to make it irrevocable. "I have done some military service," he explained, "enough to help me learn my duties as a soldier quickly."

"Ah, well, no more on that subject, then!" and the lieutenant sighed audibly. "Yet it is a pity, especially as you are of French birth and parentage, though brought up in America. Your chance of promotion would—but let us hope that by good luck something may happen to give you the chance in any case. Who knows but both your countries may be proud of you some day? Is there—nothing you would care to tell me about yourself that might enable me to advise you later?"

"Nothing with which it is necessary to trouble you, my Lieutenant."

"Bien! It remains then only for you to be examined by the medecin major. You have nothing to fear from his report. Au contraire!"

In an adjoining room two men were already waiting the arrival of the doctor, who was due in a few minutes. One, evidently a Frenchman, with a dark, dissipated face, volunteered the information that he was a chauffeur, whose master had discharged him without notice on account of an "unavoidable accident" at a small town within walking distance of Sidi-bel Abbés. The other, a blond boy who looked not a day over sixteen, announced that he was an Alsatian who had come to Algeria as a waiter in a restaurant car, on purpose to join the Legion, and escape military service as a German. "I shall serve my five years, and become a French subject," he said joyously. "Take hold of my arm. Not bad, is it, for biceps? For what age would you take me?"

"Seventeen," replied Max, adding a year to his real guess.

But it was not enough. The girlish face blushed up to the lint-coloured hair, cut en brosse. "I call myself eighteen," said the child. "Don't you think the doctor will believe me when he feels my muscle?"

"I think he'll give you the benefit of the doubt," Max assured him, smiling.

"No trouble about my age!" exulted the chauffeur. "I am twenty-seven."

He looked ten years older. But a recruit for the Legion may take the age as well as the name he likes best, provided the medecin major be not too critical.

Both his companions were keenly curious concerning Max, and considered themselves aggrieved that, after their frankness, he should choose to be reserved. They put this down to pride. But the Legion would take it out of him! All men were equal there. They had heard that among other things.

Before the stream of questions had run dry through lack of encouragement, the door was thrown open, and in walked the doctor, a big, jovial man, accompanied by the middle-aged lieutenant who had shown interest in Max, and a weary-faced clerk plunged in gloom by a bad cold in the head. As they entered, the two officers looked at Max, and glanced quickly at each other. They had evidently been speaking of him. But his examination was left till the last. The chauffeur of "twenty-seven" and the waiter of "eighteen" were passed as physically fit—bon pour le service: and then came the turn of the third recruit, whose pale blue silk underclothing brought a slight twinkle to the eye of the jolly medecin major. Max wished that it had occurred to him to buy something cheaper and less noticeable. But it was too late to think of that now. At all events, he was grateful for the tact and consideration which had given him the last turn.

"Magnifique!" exclaimed the doctor, when he had pinched and pounded Max, sounded heart and lungs, and squeezed his biceps. "Here we have an athlete." And he exchanged another glance with the lieutenant.

The clerk scribbled industriously and sadly in his book, as Max dressed himself again; and the ordeal was over. When the third recruit of the day had been given a paper, first to read, and then to sign with his new name, his contract for five years to serve the Republic of France was made and completed. Maxime St. George was a soldier of the Legion.

He, with the ex-chauffeur and the ex-waiter, was marched by a corporal through a small side gate into the barrack square; and the guard, sitting on a bench by the guardhouse, honoured the newcomers with a stare. The chauffeur and the waiter got no more than a passing glance, but all eyes, especially those of the sergeant of the guard, focussed on Max. Apparently it was not every day that the little gate beside the great gate opened for a gentleman recruit. Max realized again that he was conspicuous, and resigned himself to the inevitable. This was the last time he need suffer. In a few minutes the uniform of the Legion would make him a unit among other units, and there would be nothing to single him out from the rest. He would no longer have even a name that mattered. In losing his individuality he would become a number. But for a moment he felt like a new arrival in a Zoo: an animal of some rare species which drew the interest of spectators away from luckier beasts of commoner sorts.

The trio of recruits stood together in an unhappy group, awaiting orders from the regimental offices; and the news of their advent must have run ahead of them with magic speed, swiftly as news travels in the desert, for everywhere along the front of the yellow buildings surrounding the square, windows flew open, heads of soldiers peered out, and voices shouted eagerly: "Voilà les bleus!" There were only three newcomers, and the arrival of recruits in the barrack square was an everyday spectacle; but something to gaze at was better than nothing at all. Men in fatigue uniform of spotless white, their waists wound round with wide blue sashes, came running up to see the sight, before les bleus should be marched away and lose their value as objects of interest by donning soldier clothes. Max recalled the day of his début at West Point, a humble, modest "Pleb." This huge, gravelled courtyard, surrounded on three sides by tall, many-windowed barracks, and shut away from the Rue de Tlemcen by high iron railings, had no resemblance to the cadets' barracks of gray stone; but the emotions of the "Pleb" and of the recruit to the Legion were curiously alike. The same thought presented itself to the soldier that had wisely counselled the new cadet. "I must take it all as it comes, and keep my temper unless some one insults me. Then—well, I'll have to make myself respected now or never."

"Les bleus! Voilà les bleus!" was the cry from every quarter: and discipline not being the order of the moment for Legionnaires off duty, young soldiers and old soldiers gathered round, making such remarks as occurred to them, witty or ribald. Les bleus were fair game.

As a schoolboy, Max had read in some book that, in the time of Napoleon First, French recruits had been nicknamed "les bleus" because of the asphyxiating high collars which had empurpled their faces with a suffusion of blood. Little had he dreamed in committing that fact to memory that one day the name would be applied to him! Thinking thus, he smiled between amusement and bitterness; but the smile died as a voice whispered in his ear: "For God's sake don't sell your clothes to the Jews. Keep them for me. I'll get hold of them somehow."

The voice spoke in French. Max turned quickly, and could not resist a slight start at seeing close to his, the face which had seized his attention days ago in the railway station.

The man who had then been dressed in dusty black was now a soldier of the Legion, in white fatigue uniform, like all the rest: but the dark face and night-black eyes had the same arresting, tragic appeal. After this whisper, the Legionnaire drew back, his look asking for an answer by nod or shake of the head. Max caught the idea instantly. "By jove! the fellow has made up his mind to desert already!" he thought. "Why? He hasn't the air of a slacker."

There was no language he could choose in this group made up from a dozen countries, which might not be understood by one or all. The only thing was to trust to the other's quickness of comprehension, as the speaker had trusted to his. He held out his hand, exclaiming: "C'est vous, mon ami! Quel chance!"

The ruse was understood. His handclasp was returned with meaning. Every one supposed that le bleu of four days ago and le bleu of to-day were old acquaintances who had found each other unexpectedly.

There was no chance for private speech. A quick fire of interrogation volleyed at the three recruits, especially at Max. "Are you French? Are you German? Are you from Switzerland—Alsace—Belgium—Italy—England?" Questions spattered round the newcomers like a rain of bullets, in as many languages as the countries named, and Max amused himself by answering in the same, whenever he was able.

"How many tongues have you stowed in that fly-trap of yours, my child?" inquired a thin, elderly Legionnaire with a long nose and clever, twinkling eyes. No nation but Holland could have produced that face, and it was unnecessary that the speaker should introduce himself as a Dutchman. "Fourteen years have I served France in the Legion. I have been to Madagascar and Tonkin. Everywhere I have found myself the champion of languages, which is only natural, for I was translator in the State Department at home—a long while ago. But if you can speak eleven you will get the championship over me. I have only as many tongues as I have fingers."

"You beat me by six," laughed Max, and the jealous frown faded.

"Encore un champion!" gayly announced the round-faced youth who had jocosely asked Max if he were a Belgian. "Voilà notre joli heros, Pelle."

"Quatro oyos" ("Four Eyes") added a Spaniard. "Papa van Loo can beat you with his tongue; Four Eyes beats with his fists."

Sauntering toward les bleus, with the manner of a big dog who deigns to visit a little one, came a man of average height but immense girth. His great beardless face was so hideous, so startling, that Max gaped at him rudely, lost in horror. Nose and lips had been partly cut away. The teeth and gums showed in a ghastly, perpetual grin. But as if this were not enough to single him out among a thousand, a pair of black, red-rimmed eyes had been tattooed on the large forehead, just above a bushy, auburn line overhanging the eyes which nature had pushed deeply in between protruding cheek and frontal bones.