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"The Black Hawk can read, too," said Chanrellon meditatively; but it was the "petit nom," that Chateauroy had gained long before, and by which he was best known through the army. "No eyes are keener than his to trace a lascar kebir. But, where he hates, he strikes beak and talons pong! till the thing drops dead even where he strikes a bird of his own brood."
The boldness of speech and the quietude of tone drew all their eyes in curiosity upon him. Chanrellon flushed scarlet over his frank brow, and an instant's passion gleamed out of his eyes; the next he threw his three chairs down with a crash, as he shook his mighty frame like an Alpine dog, and bowed with a French grace, with a campaigner's frankness.
He had danced with this girl-soldier the night before at a guinguette ball, seeing her for the first time, for it was almost the first time he had been in the city since the night when he had thrown the dice, and lost ten Napoleons and the Bedouins to Claude de Chanrellon; but his thoughts were far from her in this moment. "Ouf!
Chanrellon laughed, knocking the ash off a huge cigar. "Pardieu! We do our original maker credit then; nothing good in this world without a dash of diablerie. Scruples are the wet blankets, proprieties are the blank walls, principles are the quickset hedge of life, but devilry is its champagne!" "Ventre bleu!" growled the General.
"What stakes, monsieur?" asked Chanrellon. "Ten napoleons a side and the Arabs." He set ten napoleons down on the table; they were the only coins he had in the world; it was very characteristic that he risked them. They threw the main two sixes. "You see," he murmured, with a half smile, "the dice know it is a drawn duel between you and the Arabs."
"They all want to come to us and to the Zouaves," smiled Chanrellon, surveying the figure of the one who addressed him, with a keen sense of its symmetry and its sinew. "Still, a good sword brings its welcome. Do you ask seriously, monsieur?"
"I am not a croc-mitaine, perhaps; but I say what I think, with little heed of my auditors, usually." Chanrellon bent his bright brown eyes curiously on him. "He is a croc-mitaine," he thought. "He is not to be lost." "I prefer your foes," went on the other, quite quietly, quite listlessly, as though the glittering, gas-lit cafe were not full of French soldiers.
She will have nothing under the third order of nobility; and Prince Paul shot the Duc de Var about her the other day. She is a great creature, Loto; nobody knows her secret." "Audacity, my friend! Always that!" said Chanrellon, with a twist of his superb mustaches. "It is the finest quality out; nothing so sure to win. Hallo! There is le beau corporal listening. Ah!
Claude de Chanrellon sighed, stretching his handsome limbs, with the sigh of recollection; for Paris had been a Paradise Lost to him for many seasons, and he had had of late years but one solitary glimpse of it. "It was Coeur d'Acier who was the rage in my time. She ate me up that woman in three months. I had not a hundred francs left: she stripped me as bare as a pigeon.
"You are poetic, mon General," said Claude de Chanrellon; "but you are true. We are a furnace in which Blackguardism is burned into Dare-devilry, and turned out as Heroism. A fine manufacture that, and one at which France has no equal." "But our manufactures keep the original hall mark, and show that the devil made them if the drill have molded them!" urged a Colonel of Tirailleurs Indigenes.
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