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The kick missed Max missed him by a hair but the punch landed, landed with every ounce of bone and muscle behind it that Max had in his body. Down crashed the champion on the back of his skull, with a thud amid a spatter of gravel! For an instant the huge form lay still, while the ring of Legionnaires remained petrified.
Garcia, on the contrary, was constantly falling into trouble. He had even drunk too much, once or twice, in the hope of drowning trouble, as Legionnaires do. The September march to the south was ostensibly for road-laying; but there was again a rumour of other important work to be done.
Maybe, if we brace up, we'll be taken on the big march that they talk of for the first of September. Even then there'll be time." He said "we," because it was more comforting to Valdez that their names should be bracketed together as friends; but as Legionnaires they were already far apart. He was in the school of corporals. Soon he would wear on his blue sleeve the coveted red woollen stripe.
Nobody but old Legionnaires who've seen a lot of service have got that tip." Because of Four Eyes' hints the story went round that St. George and Garcia had been sent off on special reconnaissance duty.
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.
Max feared that there was little hope for Valdez, though he meant to do what he could to help. At home in the same position it could not have been so; but in the Foreign Legion recruits talked freely, even before old Legionnaires to whom the Legion was mother and father and country. There was no fear of betrayal. The whole point of view seemed different.
But in dim side-streets of the town, far from the lights of the smart, out-of-doors cafés, were casse croutes kept by Spaniards who cared nothing for the fate of Legionnaires when they had spent their last sou. The cafard grew and prospered there. He tickled men's gray matter and kneaded it in his microscopic claws.
To-night they walked together in silence, or speaking seldom, like the other Legionnaires, and listening to the music. Suddenly the Spaniard stopped, muttering some word under his breath, and Max saw through the dusk that the olive face had gone ashy pale. "What's the matter, Garcia? Are you ill?" he asked. The other did not answer.
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. 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!
Not a man, least of all Four Eyes, grudged him his success, such "luck" as had never fallen to any mere recruit within the memory of the oldest Legionnaires, unless in the battlefield, where all are equal.
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