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I was too far off to do much good; but I shouted and dashed down to them. The Arbis heard, Biribi heard; he flew on to them like a tiger, that little Tringlo. It was wonderful! Two fell dead under him; the third took fright and fled. When I got up, Biribi lay above the dead brutes with a dozen wounds in him, if there were one. He looked up, and knew me.
"They say he is English, and a ruined Milord, pardieu! Now, I would not have an Englishman think I thought his six feet of carcass worth saving, for a ransom." The Tringlo chuckled; he was an Anglophobist.
There was Pouffer-de-Rire, a little Tringlo, the wittiest, gayest, happiest, sunniest-tempered droll in all the army; who would sing the camp-songs so joyously through a burning march that the whole of the battalions would break into one refrain as with one throat, and press on laughing, shouting, running, heedless of thirst, or heat, or famine, and as full of monkey-like jests as any gamins.
There was a big white cat curled in a ball, who had been the darling of a Tringlo, and had traveled all over North Africa on the top of his mule's back, seven seasons through; in the eighth the Tringlo was picked off by a flying shot, and an Indigene was about to skin the shrieking cat for the soup-pot, when a bullet broke his wrist, making him drop the cat with a yell of pain, and the Friend of the Flag, catching it up, laughed in his face: "A lead comfit instead of slaughter-soup, my friend!"
Soldiers cost too much training to waste them on jackals and kites, if one can help it. Lift him up quick!" "He is badly hurt?" said the Tringlo. She shrugged her shoulders. "Oh, no! I have had worse scratches myself. The horse fell on him, that was the mischief. I never saw a prettier thing every Lascar has killed his own little knot of Arbicos. Look how nice and neat they lie."
"Georges, mon brave," said the Little One, with that accent of authority which was as haughty as any General's, "do you know how that Chasseur is that we brought in last night?" "Not heard, ma belle," said the cheery little Tringlo, who was hard pressed; for there was much to be done, and he was very busy. "What is to be done with the wounded?" Georges lifted his eyebrows. "Ma belle!
Her first thought was to take care that he should never learn what she had done for him. The Princesse Corona would not have been more utterly disdained to solicit regard through making a claim upon gratitude than the fiery little warrior of France would have done. She went straight to the Tringlo who had known her at her mission of mercy.
"Shot?" they asked briefly. Biribi was a Tringlo well beloved in all the battalions. Cigarette nodded, with a gesture outward to the solitary country. She was accustomed to these incidents of war; she thought of them no more than a girl of civilized life thinks of the grouse or the partridges that are killed by her lovers and brothers. "I was out yonder, two leagues or more away.
I will have a look at him," she said, at the first empty tent they reached. The camp had been the scene of as fierce a struggle as the part of the plain which the cavalry had held, and it was strewn with the slaughter of Zouaves and Tirailleurs. The Tringlo obeyed her, and went about his errand of mercy.
The men summoned by their camp-sobriquets, which were so familiar that they had, many of them, fairly forgotten their original names, rallied around her to receive the various packets with which a Tringlo is commonly charged by friends in the towns, or relatives away in France, for the soldiers of African brigades, and which, as well as his convoy of food and his budget of news, render him so precious and so welcome an arrival at an encampment.
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