“They will never really win again, I am afraid,” he thought, as his eyes followed the wraith-like flash of the white burnous, as the Bedouins glided to and fro in the chiar-oscuro of the encampment; now in the flicker of the flames, now in the silvered luster of the moon.  “It is the conflict of the races, as the cant runs, and their day is done.  It is a bolder, freer, simpler type than anything we get in the world yonder.  Shall we ever drift back to it in the future, I wonder?”

The speculation did not stay with him long; Semitic, Latin, or Teuton race was very much the same to him, and intellectual subtleties had not much attraction at any time for the most brilliant soldier in the French cavalry; he preferred the ring of the trumpets, the glitter of the sun’s play along the line of steel as his regiment formed in line on the eve of a life-and-death struggle, the wild, breathless sweep of a midnight gallop over the brown, swelling plateau under the light of the stars, or,—­in some brief interval of indolence and razzia-won wealth,—­the gleam of fair eyes and the flush of sparkling sherbet when some passionate, darkling glance beamed on him from some Arab mistress whose scarlet lips murmured to him through the drowsy hush of an Algerine night the sense, if not the song of Pelagia,

     “Life is so short at best! 
     Take while thou canst thy rest,
     Sleeping by me!”

His thoughts drifted back over many varied scenes and changing memories of his service in Algiers, as he lay there at the entrance of the Sheik’s tent, with the night of looming shadow and reddened firelight and picturesque movement before him.  Hours of reckless, headlong delight, when men grew drunk with bloodshed as with wine; hours of horrible, unsuccored suffering, when the desert thirst had burned in his throat and the jagged lances been broken off at the hilt in his flesh, while above-head the carrion birds wheeled, waiting their meal; hours of unceasing, unsparing slaughter, when the word was given to slay and yield no mercy, where in the great, vaulted, cavernous gloom of rent rocks, the doomed were hemmed as close as sheep in shambles.  Hours, in the warm flush of an African dawn, when the arbiter of the duel was the sole judge allowed or comprehended by the tigers of the tricolor, and to aim a dead shot or to receive one was the only alternative left, as the challenging eyes of “Zephir” or “Chasse-Marais” flashed death across the barriere, in a combat where only one might live, though the root of the quarrel had been nothing more than a toss too much of brandy, a puff of tobacco smoke construed into insult, or a fille de joie’s maliciously cast fire-brand of taunt or laugh.  Hours of severe discipline, of relentless routine, of bitter deprivation, of campaigns hard as steel in the endurance they needed, in the miseries they entailed; of military subjection, stern and unbending, a yoke of iron that a personal and pitiless tyranny weighted with persecution that was