“Give half to Zackrist,” he said.  “I know no hunger; and he has more need of it.”

“Zackrist!  That is the man who stole your lance and accouterments, and got you into trouble by taking them to pawn in your name, a year or more ago.”

“Well, what of that?  He is not the less hungry.”

“What of that?  Why, you were going to be turned into the First Battalion,[*] disgraced for the affair, because you would not tell of him; if Vireflau had not found out the right of the matter in time!”

     [*] The Battalion of the criminal outcasts of all corps,
     whether horse or foot.

“What has that to do with it?”

“This, M. Victor, that you are a fool.”

“I dare say I am.  But that does not make Zackrist less hungry.”

He took the bowl from her hands and, emptying a little of it into the wooden bidon that hung to her belt, kept that for himself and, stretching his arm across the straw, gave the bowl to Zackrist, who had watched it with the longing, ravenous eyes of a starving wolf, and seized it with rabid avidity.

A smile passed over Cecil’s face, amused despite the pain he suffered.

“That is one of my ‘sensational tricks,’ as M. de Chateauroy calls them.  Poor Zackrist!  Did you see his eyes?”

“A jackal’s eyes, yes!” said Cigarette, who, between her admiration for the action and her impatience at the waste of her good bread and wine, hardly knew whether to applaud or to deride him.  “What recompense do you think you will get?  He will steal your things again, first chance.”

“May be.  I don’t think he will.  But he is very hungry, all the same; that is about the only question just now,” he answered her as he drank and ate his portion, with a need of it that could willingly have made him take thrice as much, though for the sake of Zackrist, he had denied his want of it.

Zackrist himself, who could hear perfectly what was said, uttered no word; but when he had finished the contents of the bowl, lay looking at his corporal with an odd gleam in the dark, sullen savage depths of his hollow eyes.  He was not going to say a word of thanks; no! none had ever heard a grateful or a decent word from him in his life; he was proud of that.  He was the most foul-mouthed brute in the army, and, like Snake in the School for Scandal, thought a good action would have ruined his character forever.  Nevertheless, there came into his cunning and ferocious eyes a glisten of the same light which had been in the little gamin’s when, first by the bivouac fire, he had murmured, “Picpon s’en souviendra.”

“When anybody stole from me,” muttered Cigarette, “I shot him.”

“You would have fed him, had he been starving.  Do not belie yourself, Cigarette; you are too generous ever to be vindictive.”

“Pooh!  Revenge is one’s right.”

“I doubt that.  We are none of us good enough to claim it, at any rate.”