From the hour of the restoration of his treasure the Sheik had been true to his oath; his tribe in all its branches had held the French lascar in closest brotherhood; wherever they were he was honored and welcomed; was he in war, their swords were drawn for him; was he in need, their houses of hair were spread for him; had he want of flight, the swiftest and most precious of their horses was at his service; had he thirst, they would have died themselves, wringing out the last drop from the water-skin for him.  Through him their alliance, or more justly to speak, their neutrality, was secured to France, and the Bedouin Chief loved him with a great, silent, noble love that was fast rooted in the granite of his nature.  Between them there was a brotherhood that beat down the antagonism of race, and was stronger than the instinctive hate of the oppressed for all who came under the abhorred standard of the usurpers.  He liked the Arabs, and they liked him; a grave courtesy, a preference for the fewest words and least demonstration possible, a marked opinion that silence was golden, and that speech was at best only silver-washed metal, an instinctive dread of all discovery of emotion, and a limitless power of resisting and suppressing suffering, were qualities the nomads of the desert and the lion of the Chasseurs d’Afrique had in common; as they had in unison a wild passion for war, a dauntless zest in danger, and a love for the hottest heat of fiercest battle.

Silence reigned in the tent, beyond whose first division, screened by a heavy curtain of goat’s hair, the beautiful young Djelma played with her only son, a child of three or four summers; the Sheik lay mute, the Djouad and Marabouts around never spoke in his presence unless their lord bade them, and the Chasseur was stretched motionless, his elbow resting on a cushion of Morocco fabric, and his eyes looking outward at the restless, changing movement of the firelit, starlit camp.

After the noise, the mirth, the riotous songs, and the gay, elastic good humor of his French comrades, the silence and the calm of the Emir’s “house of hair” were welcome to him.  He never spoke much himself; of a truth, his gentle, immutable laconism was the only charge that his comrades ever brought against him.  That a man could be so brief in words, while yet so soft in manner, seemed a thing out of all nature to the vivacious Frenchmen; that unchanging stillness and serenity in one who was such a reckless, resistless croc-mitaine, swift as fire in the field, was an enigma that the Cavalry and the Demi-cavalry of Algeria never solved.  His corps would have gone after him to the devil, as Claude de Chanrellon had averred; but they would sometimes wax a little impatient that he would never grow communicative or thread many phrases together, even over the best wine which ever warmed the hearts of its drinkers or loosened all rein from their lips.

“I wish I had come straight to you, Sidi, when I first set foot in Africa,” he said at last, while the fragrant smoke uncurled from under the droop of his long, pendent mustaches.