Читать книгу McGlusky o' the Legion - A. G. Hales - Страница 3

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“A’m no sayin’ ye will na bring the back o’ yr hand across ma mouth as ye threaten, ma mon, but if ye dae A’ll bend yr head back till ye can see God A’michty’s blue sky through the front o’ yr ain legs, so’s ye’ll no ken whether ye’re marchin’ forard or backward when the bugle blaws. A’m a tenderfoot in the ways o’ the Foreign Legion o’ France, as ye say, ma frien’, but A’m no a tenderfoot in the way o’ armies o’ ither countries, an’ a soldier’s a soldier the wide world over: eef he’s a mon, he’s a mon, an’ tha’s a’ there is tae it; eef he’s a bully an’ a pimp—as A’m thinkin’ ye air yer ainsel’, though A’m no meanin’ tae be unfriendly, ye ken—then he’s a trouble maker an’ a trouble seeker, an’, ma buckie, he fin’s eet.”

The speaker was a grand looking man in the glory of manhood; long, lean, sinewy, a mass of bone and rippling muscle, with a face that looked a cross between that of the ancient Egyptian Rameses and a Red Indian chieftain: high of cheek-bone, with an eagle beak, with huge nostrils that spoke for unlimited supplies of fresh air to feed all the vital forces; his large mouth was an index of strength and weakness; he could be strong with men, this man, strong unto death, but with women—ah, my friends, that is a different story. God, how they can get under or over our guard; how easily they can fool us, just where and when we think we are strongest. Eh hue, what a world-old story it is, and one men never have learnt and never will learn: the story of the subtle power of the fragrance of a woman’s hair, the lure in a woman’s eyes, the magic in a woman’s whisper, the electric madness in the touch of a woman’s finger-tips, the beginning, often the ending, of a man’s career in the sensuous rustling of a woman’s gown amid the silken silences of a starlit night. Eh hue, what wise fools the strong men be who follow these things; to them, and to them only, the wine of life, the honey in the comb, the fragrance of the garden of the gods; to them also the hyssop and the gall, the wormwood and the bitter aloes, the mingled joy and pain, the mad, wild thrill of the desire accomplished at all costs, all hazards, and the cold, grey misery of the aftermath, punctuated by a woman’s smile of mockery, or disdainful glance of indifference born of satiety.

The mouth of the legionary bespoke him one fashioned by fate to drink deeply of the cup that only women hold, and therein lay his weakness. The chin below the mouth bespoke him a lion amongst men; the brow above was the brow of a thinker, but there was something also in the general manufacture of the rugged face, either natural or acquired, that spoke for recklessness, both moral and physical, with more than a hint of truculence and aggressiveness; a strong, stubborn face, with the saving grace of sly humour in the wrinkles at the corners of the hard-set eyes, a queer mixture of human follies and frailties, strong points and weaknesses, but withal a man, but a man who might easily become a fanatic in any cause he espoused. The picturesque uniform of the French Légion d’Afrique suited him down to the ground; it seemed to add to his towering height and to his immense breadth of shoulder, and yet it emphasised the greyhound leanness of his flanks. He was like a lion that had had to travel far and hunt hard for its food, and there was something lionlike in the steady fixity of the eyes he turned upon the man he had been addressing. This person, Gaston Leveroux, was a man not new to the Legion, though not a veteran, a strongly-knit, agile fellow, whose sneering lips and sombrely insolent eyes bespoke him a man to whom a quarrel was as the salt of life, the sort of creature who would fall out with the bread he was biting because it was too hard or too soft, too easily come by or too hard to get; a living peg who would quarrel with a round hole because it was not square, or a square hole because it was not round. Just what cause he had had to pick the present encounter, no one but he himself knew. He had seen the new recruit come into the barrack-room, and possibly because of the quietly confident bearing of the new arrival, who had asked neither advice nor guidance of anyone, but had marched silently between the rows of beds until he came to the one over which on the whitewashed wall was branded the number which had been given to him when he had been outfitted with his uniform, and had then methodically proceeded to arrange the few things provided and permitted by the service on the small shelf above the head of the bed.

A group of legionaries had drawn near the new-comer, possibly with an idea of getting something for nothing out of the stranger, for in the Legion a raw recruit was considered fair game; it was his business to look out for himself; if he could not do so at the outset, he would soon learn, just as every wolf in a wolf-pack learns to guard its own bone. One of the little crowd had slyly possessed himself of the small cake of soap, a very precious possession in the Legion, which is rationed to each man, when he fancied the big new-comer was not on the qui vive. As the looter was turning to stroll nonchalantly away, a big sinewy hand had shot out, and fixed itself upon the slack and baggy part of the looter’s breeches, and by this unorthodox hold the purloiner was hoisted from the floor, his hands and feet hanging down.

“A’m na lettin’ oot ma washin’, A dae tha’ masel’,” the big fellow had purred softly.

A great shout of laughter had greeted the capture of the looter, who had promptly disgorged the stolen property, and retired, with a broad grin at his own discomfiture, but with no shame, for the despoiling of a raw recruit was looked upon as a perquisite of the more seasoned service men.

“A’ve cut ma weesdom teeth in sic matters,” the new-comer had remarked with a sly twinkle in his eyes. “Ye ken A served ma apprenticeship in th’ airmy o’ the Anzacs, an’ those muckies wad tak’ the horse from unner ye wi’oot ye knowin’ it, eef ye happened no tae be wide awake. A’m no slow in sic matters ma ainsel’,” he added with a good-tempered chuckle. “A ken it’s the law in a’ armies tae watch as well as pray.”

All would have ended good-naturedly enough if Gaston Leveroux had not butted in at this period.

“You’ll learn a lot in the Regiment d’Afrique you never learnt in the Anzac army,” he sneered.

“Maybe,” was the mild rejoinder. “A’m here tae learn, but A’ve served in ither armies.”

“Bah, you and your Anzacs, you think you won the Great War, don’t you, eh?”

“No tha’ iver I heard o’,” smiled the new man. “We just did oor bit as weel as we were able, na mair, na less. We air no a fechtin’ breed fr the sake o’ fechtin’; we love the saft word tha’ turneth away wrath, an’ we dinna think every German is a bluidy murderer because we had a fecht wi’ them.”

The very mildness of the stranger seemed to enrage Gaston Leveroux. He was spoiling for trouble, and meant to have it.

“What name are we to know you by in the Legion?”

“Wha’ name? Why, ma ain. I’ve na cause tae blush fr it. James, Archibald, Cameron McGlusky is ma full name, but,” blandly, “ye ma’ ca’ me Jamie fr short; tha’s wha’ Lord Kitchener called ma every time A dined wi’ him durin’ the African War: it used tae be Jamie an’ Herbert wi’ him an’ me,” he added with twinkling eyes and a sly chuckle.

“You’re a liar,” snarled Gaston.

“Maybe A am,” chortled McGlusky, “but ma freend, A’m no feelin’ lonely on tha’ account while ye air in th’ viceenity.”

It was then that Gaston voiced the threat that opens this history, and McGlusky gave him his answer. The next moment Gaston struck, in fulfilment of his boast. The back of his hand rapped sharply against Mac’s teeth, and a thin trickle of blood ran from the big recruit’s lips down over his chin.

A silence that was portentous followed the blow, just such a silence as in nature precedes the bursting of a storm. In the French Légion d’Afrique a man who accepted a blow without at least attempting to retaliate was henceforth a pariah, the brand of the poltroon was upon him, and he was outcast of his kind, a leper. Cowardice was the one unforgiveable sin, and there were not many cowards in that wolf-pen whose ranks had been recruited from all the nations of the earth. It was the unwritten law that a man who had been struck had the right to challenge his insulter to a duel à la mort with either pistols or steel, or he could leap upon his adversary and fight him with fang and claw, using hands and feet, or butting with the skull. In such a mêlée there were no rules; if a combatant went down, his enemy could make of him a human football, or jump his vitals out, if he did not cry peccavi and admit himself vanquished. A man might be a great boxer, wrestler or savate artist, and yet be beaten by one who had no skill in those gentle pastimes. In some parts of America the same law applies; in the land of the Stars and Stripes it is known as a “rough house.” Every Legionary present when Gaston struck his blow paused in whatever he was doing at the moment, to see what the big recruit would do; they knew Gaston for a good swordsman, a fine pistol shot, a master of savate and a terror in a rough-housing. The card players and domino experts, who were scattered all over the long, low-ceiled barrack-room, halted in their movements, as if an electric wire had paralysed them; hands that were in the act of shuffling a card pack or reaching out to draw in cards that had been dealt, became stationary in mid-air; fingers that had been extended claw-like to rake in the paltry stakes won at dominoes, remained still, like claws that had missed their grip; the laughter of winners, the oaths of losers remained unfinished on the lips. The group of men near the two central figures in the drama stood as if petrified, each in the pose in which the climax had found him, but every eye was fixed upon McGlusky, and the stillness was so still that it throbbed.

Slowly, like a man awaking from a dream, the big fellow raised one large paw and passed it over his mouth and chin, wiping away the crimson stain. Slowly he examined the red smear upon his palm, then a smile that would have been hard to fathom grew around his mouth; he looked from his hand to the face of Gaston, who had crouched a little, as if expecting a mad onslaught.

“A’m sorry. A did no expec’ sic a welcome inta th’ Legion.” Again he examined the red smudge on his palm. “A cam’ here hopin’ tae be a bon camarade tae all A foregathered wi’. Ye hae broken ma face an’ bruised ma speerit, Gaston, but A’ll forgie ye later.”

A gasp of unutterable amazement swept the barrack-room. The speaker looked such a lion, and showed the spirit of a cow.

“Mother of God,” croaked Pierre Lotti, the greatest thief and card-sharp, and the deadliest pistol shot in the Legion, “how did such a louse as that get into our uniform? Pah, the service has gone to the devil.”

McGlusky heard the bitter words, but he only gazed at Pierre with an expression of mild reproach.

“Dinna judge ower harshly, camarade,” he murmured. “A hae spent ma blood in ither pairts o’ Africa, but this is the first o’ mine shed here in Morocco.”

“Camarade,” hissed Pierre. “You are no camarade of mine. Put on a petticoat an’ go and get a living on the streets; it is all you are fit for. Pouf—name of a motherless monkey, what is the service coming to?”

Then the card-sharp spat, for words would not ease his feelings. McGlusky smiled at him sadly.

“A’m one o’ the world’s misjudged,” he almost whispered. “A cam’ like an olive tree planted in a desert place, tae dae good an’ bide in peace, but all men revile ma. Losh, it’s gey hard tae be misun’erstood o’ men all ma days.” Then, turning to the fellow who had struck him, he said with a mournful cadence in his deep voice: “Mon Gaston, ye’ve the face o’ a baboon that has seen its ain sins an’ been frichted by the picture. A’m hopin’ yr mither died in child-birth, before she saw wha’ she had brocht inta the world. A’m meanin’ na disrespec’ tae ye or yr minnie, though A’m theenkin’ ye air as ugly on the inside as ye air on the out. Eef God made ye, He must hae done it in the dark. A’ll put up a bit prayer fr ye the nicht.”

Then with easy strength he brushed aside all who happened to be in his path, and made his way with long strides out of the barrack-room.

“By gar,” gasped Pierre Lotti, “he come straight from the bug-house, that one. We all go mad before we in Afrique long, but that one he was mad before he start, yes, begosh.”

The legionaries were still discussing McGlusky and his apparent want of sanity, when he suddenly returned to the barrack-room, carrying in his hand a large wooden horse-bucket with a rope handle. All present watched him, but Mac looked neither to the right nor left. When he reached his bed, he removed his blue tunic, and folding it neatly, he laid it on his bed, and tossed his peaked cap down beside it, and then rolled his shirt sleeves up to his shoulders, and took a hitch at his belt.

“Me,” whispered Pierre Lotti, “if he come close enough to bite, I am going to shoot him. He has the rabies, Messieurs; some mad dog has bitten him. I shoot—me.”

Having made his preparations, Mac placed the big wooden bucket in the middle of the room, and beckoned to Gaston Leveroux to advance.

“What for?” demanded Gaston, whose nerve had been somewhat shaken by McGlusky’s cool preparations and Pierre’s whispered remarks concerning rabies.

“Wha’ for?” replied Mac. “Did ye na strike ma across ma mooth wi’ yr han’?”

Gaston gave a surly grunt of acquiescence.

“Weel, A’m gaun tae stan’ ye on yr head in yon bucket, an’ squeeze ye doon till yr buttocks an’ yr brains meet. A dinna want,” he explained, turning to the crowd, “tae splash Gaston all ower the floor an’ the beddin’; it’s a mucky job cleanin’ up wha’s left o’ a mon after a fecht, so A brocht a wee bit bucket.”

“Begosh,” mumbled Pierre Lotti, edging towards the farther end of the room, “it ees Gaston who is mad to pick a fight with this man.”

“Ye dinna seem tae ma tae be boilin’ ower wi’ eagerness tae continue th’ argument ye stairted, Gaston,” protested Mac plaintively. “A’m theenkin’ yr courage is a’ froth an’ bubble. Eef ye’ve na stomach fr a fecht, A’ll let ye off light. Get doon on yr han’s an’ knees, an’ lick ma shoon, an’ then bark like a dog an’ wag yr tail, an’ All kick ye ower an’ unner the tables tae th’ door; then we’ll say nae mair aboot it. A always like tae be frien’ly.”

It was then that Gaston plucked up courage. Sauntering jauntily towards McGlusky, he suddenly made a rush and a spring; one of his feet shot out like a whip-lash uncoiling itself, and the toe of the boot took Mac under the left ear, sending him sprawling backwards over the nearest truckle bed, and the room rocked with the laughter of the wolf-pack. Gaston swaggered about, a grin on his ugly mouth, a scowl upon his heavy black brows. He would have gone to the fallen man there and then, and jumped the life well out of him, only that he thought he had taken all the fight out of him; few men, as Gaston well knew, wanted to renew a combat after a terrific kick à la savate had landed under an ear, and he wanted the prestige of having settled this big fellow out of hand in five seconds; later he would make him eat out of his hand, and incidentally milk him of any money he might have in his possession.

“He say he put me head first in the wooden bucket, ma foi; me, Gaston Leveroux, the bully boy of the Legion.” He slapped his broad chest, and laughed. “His mother must have been a she-cat with no morals. To-morrow I beat him up good and hard, and then he shall clean my accoutrements. Long I have wanted a batman to polish my buttons an’ work the brush on my uniform, me.”

Mac was sitting up by this time, and was running his fingers through his hair, and looking round him with lacklustre eyes; his expression seemed to say: “Where am I, and what is it all about? Am I a casualty in a train accident, or have I got mixed up with a volcano?” He looked so unutterably sheepish in his bewilderment, that the rough blades of all nations who gazed upon him simply enjoyed him, and chuckled with grim good nature. They had despised him when they thought him a coward, but since he had tried to fight they changed their contempt to mere amusement. To Mac the room was all one big blur; the bed on which he sat seemed to go up and down, and the whitewashed walls would not keep still for a moment.

Gaston went to him and took him by the ear, and jerked him to his feet.

“Remove that bucket.”

Mac looked in the direction indicated by Gaston’s outstretched hand, and saw not one bucket but fifty, and all of them dancing.

“Which yin?” he demanded solemnly.

“The one you brought in, son of a pig with many fathers.”

“A’m a bit wrang in ma head,” murmured McGlusky, “but A’m no a pig. A’ll trouble you tae leave go o’ ma lug.”

Gaston did let go, but the next moment he had swung his arm and dealt Mac such a buffet on the side of his jaw that the big fellow sprawled on all fours on the floor, where he remained, too weak and dazed to rise. It was then that Gaston’s real nature disclosed itself. He had a man down, and utterly at his mercy. Standing behind McGlusky, he swung a leg and kicked, and kept on kicking with merciless ferocity until a reedy voice rose high and clear.

“Say, matey, that’s abart enuff o’ that, ain’t hit? Lor’ love me, you’ve blinkin’ well kicked th’ stuffin’ out o’ th’ blighter’s ’ind end up under ’is bally ears, you ’ave.”

The protest came from a smallish man who had risen from a table where he had been card playing. Gaston cast a supercilious glance in the peace-maker’s direction, and saw a soldier so thin that had he been canned he might have passed for a red herring sun-dried and salted down, a flat-chested, sloping-shouldered, wizened-faced specimen of humanity, whose uniform hung upon him as if it had been made for the wire frame of a man and left unfinished. His small head was upheld by a scrawny neck; he was bare-headed, and his sparse hair showed its sadly sandy complexion, as if apologizing for being where real hair should have grown. If ever a man’s appearance heralded the fact that from his mother’s dugs to early manhood he had never known a full square meal of wholesome food, this individual’s did: gutter-bred and gutter-nurtured was graven all over him for the world to see, but there was spunk in his pale blue eyes, and a nasty twist to his thin, almost colourless lips, and an easy self-assurance in his manner that seemed to say that he had proved himself and held his own in rough company, ere ever he had seen Africa or worn a uniform. Gaston either held this person in contempt, or affected to do so.

“It is you that shoot out of your mouth, eh, Ring Rat? Keep your chin an’ your nose closer together when I amuse myself, me, Gaston Leveroux, or I tweest the neck of you like that, me.”

He made a motion as if wringing the neck of a fowl as he spoke, and a peculiar look crept into the little pale blue eyes of the Ring Rat, an expression of mingled cunning, cruelty and unutterable devilment.

“Love me,” he exclaimed in his reedy voice, that somehow seemed to have been starved with his body, “no one ain’t properly twisted my neck since Dick Burge did it wiff a punch that lef’ me as looney as that big stiff on the floor there; put me art fr nine hours, Dick did, but Gaston, you ain’t no Dick Burge, not by a ’ell of a ’eap. Now you ’op it, an’ I’ll get some o’ the boys to ’elp me put that big stiff on ’is little bed; ’e’s ’ad orl the kickin’ that’s good fr ’im.”

Without a word, Gaston hurled a kick at the Ring Rat’s stomach, a kick that, had it landed, would have been a meal and a half, and some over for breakfast, but the Ring Rat had evidently considered that his interference might bring forth some response of that nature. He was no tyro in the game of savate himself, and above all he knew Gaston and his pretty little ways, for the Ring Rat had already served two of his five years in the Legion, and a man who had got his livelihood from infancy in the slums of London could be trusted to learn a lot in two years, for a sharper, gamer, hardier lot of humans do not exist on this planet than the men of the slums of the old grey city by the Thames. The Ring Rat did not seem to hurry himself, but he had learnt the only trade he knew outside of soldiering in the Blackfriars boxing-halls, where he had won many a hard, stern fight, though, as he himself put it, he did his training pushing a coster’s barrow, and his diet was sixpennyworth of fish and ’taters per diem, and he slept in a cellar with nine other barrow-pushers, and his sumptuous bedding consisted of the clothing he wore and a few gunny sacks picked up in Covent Garden market, when the original owners were otherwise engaged. He had picked up a gold watch there one morning in the same unostentatious manner, and might have lived to be a successful financier had not a gentleman in a blue uniform observed his sudden accession to wealth in the shape of a gold watch, and the neat but unlawful way in which he had started on the way to high finance, a start, by the way, not at all uncommon, though many have the luck not to be caught. When the gentleman in blue raiment laid a not too gentle hand on the Ring Rat’s coat collar, that ambitious personage promptly hooked the blue uniform in the tenderest part of his midriff, and then uppercut him under the chin, and left Covent Garden and his hired barrow without ceremony, but with much speed. For three months he was hunted as if he were a smallpox microbe, and thrice nothing saved him from capture but his utter lack of ceremony. Once it was a plain-clothes gentleman from Scotland Yard who tried to curtail his freedom. The Rat promptly snatched hold of the Scotland Yard man’s coat lapels, and jerked the coat well down over the detective’s arms, butted him on the chin with his head, ran down an alley, sauntered into a boarding-house, saying he was the representative of the gas company come to examine the meter, thus finding sanctuary till the hue and cry had passed on; then he had climbed through a skylight on to the roof, and had slept there until nightfall, when he made a most unostentatious journey to a railway station, climbed on to the roof of a railway carriage, and lay flat. Where the train was going he did not know or care, as long as it was going away from London, in which city he gravely doubted if he was as popular as a British-born subject ought to be, but seldom is. He dropped off that train sans cérémonie at a seaport, and for the first time in his life saw what was romantically, and most untruthfully, called “blue” water; it might have been blue once, if so, it had turned decidedly bilious, for it was about the colour of a fat bookmaker reading his income-tax, and planning how not to pay it. The Rat got a ride to France on a nice steamboat, in much the same manner as he had got his ride out of London, and somehow by the grace of God and the use of his sharp wits, he found his way to Paris, and in that city of sham gaiety, where hotel bills are of the longest and women’s skirts of the shortest (perhaps the Paris hotel bills are high because skirts are also—there is generally a cause for an effect) the Rat joined the Légion d’Afrique, not because he could not annex a gold watch or two, but because when he had them he did not know enough French to pawn them; for that matter, he could not talk enough of the tongue of La Belle France to give the watches away, though he did give one to a gendarme who was following him suspiciously, and in return for his generosity the gendarme politely directed him to the recruiting office of the Legion, in fact, the gendarme went with him as far as the dingy little abode of the recruiting officer, and stood patiently at the door until he was sure the Rat could not come out again as a civilian; if he had done so, that gendarme, honest man, would not have dared to have disposed of the gold watch the mad Inglees nobleman (?) had presented to him. The Legion was badly in need of men, so no audible doubts were cast upon the Rat’s statements to the recruiting officer when, in the vilest of slum English, he had described himself as the member of a “Hinglish ducal fambly, hout for a bit ov hadventure.” The officer who signed him on (he made his impudent ducal mark with a cross and a flourish) had grinned behind his hand, but he wanted tough fighting material for Africa, and he had had some of London’s slum children before, and knew their worth.

“Take this rat away, and see he is well scrubbed and his hair cut and disinfected, before he gets into uniform,” he had said to the Corporal, and that is how the legionary became possessed of his name of Rat.

Later, when it was discovered that he could box, the Legion itself added Ring to Rat, and the derelict was quite content.

When Gaston kicked, and the Ring Rat side-stepped like a dancing-master, the blood-lusting legionaries roared their applause, for to a man they were killers, and the sound of that roar was music in the Rat’s ears; he had heard that kind of music often when he had dropped a man in the boxing arena, and he loved it. Smiling a snarling sort of smile, he pirouetted round Gaston, his skinny right arm cuddled against his flat chest, his left working in and out. Gaston kicked again, this time for the side of the head. The Rat ducked under it, and laughed, and then cast a few kind remarks concerning Gaston’s mother and sisters in the powerfully built soldier’s teeth; if any of the Rat’s listeners had believed what he said, none of them would have gone to a nunnery to look for Gaston’s female relatives. Gaston gave up kicking, and rushed in to wrestle; a left arm like a section of a gas-pipe, so thin and mean was it, shot out, and Gaston’s rush was stopped in mid career, and his big, brutal head was jolted back.

“Lor’ love a duck, Gaston; you shouldn’t do that; it ain’t ’ealthy to run into a left ’and. Don’t you know no better’n that? Fink you’re a German tank running into barbed wire, eh?”

The Ring Rat was enjoying himself; all his movements had the uncanny grace of the well-tutored athlete, and his spirit scorned the other fellow’s advantages of bulk and strength. His dancing, gliding feet took him in to administer punishment, and carried him out in good time to escape the heavy battering of the stronger man.

“You’re the sort o’ pie I like, Gaston,” he jeered, as he surveyed Gaston’s bleeding face after the latter had made half a dozen ineffectual rushes. “If,” he continued, “you was an ’ash ’ouse, I’d send up my plate for two ’elpin’s. Gawd, Gaston, you’re a ’op picnic, an’ a dawg fight, an’ a girl cuddle in th’ Old Kent Road all in one, you are, matey.”

As he finished speaking, he stepped close in between Gaston’s big, hairy arms, and made a few swift, magic passes with his two hands and arms; then he shot a swift, deadly, left-handed stab with the hand turned over, so that the knuckles were in advance, and those bony knuckles fell right on the big apple in Gaston’s bull throat. Only a boxer knows the murderous effect of such a blow. Down dropped Gaston’s big square chin; his mouth was agape, his lower jaw hanging on its hinges, and as every anatomist knows, the back hinges of a man’s jaws connect with the spinal column, and a jar on the jaw spells partial paralysis of brain and body. Dick Burge had served up just such treatment to the Rat once, and had followed it with a jolt to the chin, and when the Rat had awakened nine hours later Charley Mitchell, the master anatomist of the Magic Circle, had explained the situation to the bewildered Rat, adding:

“The next time you get it on the apple of the throat, drop before the right comes across,” to which sage advice the Rat had remarked ruefully:

“Charley, there ain’t goin’ to be no next time wiff Dick; once is enough.”

The Ring Rat saw Gaston’s jaw sag after he had snapped a left jab on to the apple of the sturdy man’s throat; for one fleeting second he balanced himself on his toes, then he chipped with his right hand, and just nipped the point of the sagging chin, and Gaston went limp all over; his eyes rolled in their sockets, until nothing was showing but the whites, then he let go and crumpled up like a pricked bladder.

“’Struth,” muttered the Ring Rat, as he strolled across the room to a group of his cronies, “Hi’ve ’ad a ’arder fight than that in London fr a gory purse by a thick ’un an’ a ’alf, an’ done my trainin’ lickin’ sardine tins fr the want o’ somethin’ solid tr put inside me. I fought Snowball who beat Carpentier, an’ ’ad one feed between Sunday an’ Wednesday night, an’ that feed was a hegg an’ a rasher ov ’am. The hegg was in the old age department before it came to London from Belgium, an’ the ’en that laid it was entered in the anæmic stakes, an’ was too sick to start; as fr the ’am, it had been on the discard ’eap an’ been buried an’ dug up because it was too strong to stay underground; it was the liveliest bit ov ’am I ever chased; it wouldn’t stay on my plate, but tried to climb up my sleeve an’ crawl down my back.”

The fight between Gaston and the Ring Rat was all over before McGlusky the recruit had come to his senses sufficiently to know whether he was in Africa or Iceland. It was the Ring Rat who linked an arm in his, and led him stumblingly to his bed, on which he fell like a log, and drifted into a hideous semblance of slumber.

“’Ee got it good, that big feller,” the Rat confided to his especial coterie of cronies. “If Gaston’s boot had landed ’arf a inch lower down, ’e would ’ave woke up where the ’arps sound th’ reveille fr breakfast.”

“Bah, that big man, I think he is a coward,” sneered a hard-bitten Frenchman, who, as all the Legion knew, had joined up to escape a life sentence on Devil’s Island, for being too generous with his knife.

“Maybe,” replied the Rat. “You never can tell, but if ’e’s a coward, I’m a bad guesser. I’ve seen ’is sort before.”

“Gaston beat him as easy as beatin’ a mule, an’ you beat Gaston like an Arab woman beatin’ a carpet on the sand,” sneered the Frenchman.

“Y-e-s, but them things don’t always figger out as they look. The big stiff, who calls ’imself McGlusky, wasn’t wise to savate, an’ Gaston gave it to ’im good: ’e’ll know better next time. I’ll just go an’ ’ave a look at ’im; ’e may need a little ’elp.”

The Rat did go, and he did give quite a lot of help, for when he came away from McGlusky’s bedside he had pretty nearly everything that was portable belonging to the recruit in his possession: pipe, tobacco, soap, razor, horn-handled pocket-knife, wrist watch and all the loose change the big recruit had on his person.

“Might as well take it,” he chuckled. “If Hi don’t, some o’ these ’eathen foreigners will, an’ I’d just ’ate to see a furriner get ahead of a Britisher. ’E’s got to learn the ropes, anyway.”

When the bugle sounded the reveille half an hour before dawn, McGlusky awoke with the rest, and sat up with a start, and looked around him with bewilderment. He had no remembrance of having gone to bed, nor could he for a moment or two remember where he was. He was still puzzling things out, when the thin voice of the Ring Rat cut in upon his consciousness.

“Get a move on, matey, or you’ll get no grub. This ain’t the ’Otel Cecil, an’ you ain’t in the Strand, an’ there ain’t no second ’elpin’s at table ’ere—damn little to make a song abart in the way o’ grub if you get orl your share. I’d give one ov me farver’s heyes, I would, fr an ’addock or a ’errin’,” added the whimsical voice plaintively.

Memory came back to McGlusky, and shame swept over him like a tidal wave. He could not remember the particulars, but he knew he had been beaten to a frazzle in the encounter with Gaston, and defeat never sat nicely upon him.

“A talked too dom much,” he growled to his own soul. “It was the twa nips o’ absinthe A had wi’ th’ Corporal afore A cam’ inta barracks tha’ did it; A didna ken th’ dom stuff had sae much power in ’t; A thocht A cud drink a bucket fu’ o’ it an’ no feel it, an’, Jamie McGlusky, it’s made ye eat the dust o’ humeeliation; it’s the first an’ the last absinthe fr ye, ye loon.”

As he had slept in the greater part of his uniform, his toilet did not take him long. He searched for his soap, and found it had taken unto itself wings; his pocket comb had likewise removed itself. He had no illusions as to the mode of disappearance of his property.

“Losh,” he muttered, “it’s a gran’ baptism ye’ve gied yersel’ inta th’ Legion, Jamie. Weel, weel, ye’ll just hae tae suck wha’ ye canna bite, an’ buy at th’ canteen wha’ th’ blasties hae robbed ye o’. Lord send ye a patient speerit. The looters air chucklin’ in their innards th’ noo, but this is ainly the first lap in th’ race.” He began to search in his clothing for the money to pay at the canteen. “Gone,” he muttered at last, “every bawbee gone, no’ even a nickel left, an’ A had seven golden Napoleons an’ a han’ful’ o’ small change. God A’michty, th’ fall o’ Babylon was naething tae this. They’ve left me naething but the birthmark ma mither gied ma, an’ they’d hae taken tha’ eef they cud hae pawned it. Seven golden Napoleons an’ a han’fu’ o’ loose change—a’ that wealth gone like a dream tha’ is told, an’ the sun is risin’ in the heavens as eef naething had happened oot o’ the ordinar’. May th’ Lord turn ma blood tae spittle eef A dinna go through this gang o’ thieves till A leave them naething but their teeth.”

He strode to the long narrow table, where the meagre breakfast was already being served out. Every soldier was grabbing his share, and anything else he could lay hands upon; it was every dog for his own bone, and like famished dogs, the lean, sun-dried men snatched snarlingly at the food, greedy eyes and itching fingers ready for any stray morsel, for La Belle République gives only just enough to its Légion d’Afrique to keep the desert pack fit. There was no seat for McGlusky; there would have been plenty of room if the men had sat close, but he had made an unimpressive beginning overnight, and was of no account, and a bad beginning in any walk of life, from licking stamps in an office to wooing a widow with half a million and a racing stud, takes a lot of sweat, fret and worry to make up later; it’s the first step that so often marks the line that leads to failure or success. A big fellow was sitting right at the end of the table, and taking up two men’s room with his elbows sprawling and his broad buttocks planted sideways; he was said to have thrown a bomb at Mussolini in Florence, and only escaped lynching by the sheer ferocity of his attacks on the crowd; how he had escaped and joined the Legion marked him as a good man to let alone. Mac was in the mood to have pared the hoofs of Satan himself; the thought of his vanished wealth was gnawing at his vitals.

“Shift yr hunkers, an’ move up a wee bittie.”

As he spoke, Mac gave the fellow’s shoulders a by no means gentle jolt with his bony elbow. Bomb, as the brute was known in the Legion, looked half round, and deliberately spat on McGlusky’s uniform. With a growl that was mastiff-like, Mac seized him, yanked him to his feet, swung him off his legs, and, picking the big body up as if it were a battering-ram, he charged at the wall of the room, and it was good for Bomb that the wall was built of clay, and not brick or stone. The fellow’s head was big, and mostly bone, but even his thick skull could not stand being driven at express speed into a sun-dried sod wall. He went limp after the first butt, and Mac dropped him, remarking:

“Man, eet’s a good job fr ye A dinna beat ye wi’ ill will; A’m no in th’ mood fr pranks th’ morn.”

Going back to the table, he seized what was nearest to him in the shape of food, and ate like a wolf that has made a kill, and no man there molested him.

After the meal, the Ring Rat, who had impudence enough to have started an argument with Satan about sin, loafed in his peculiar way to where McGlusky stood, searching vainly in his empty pockets for the wherewithal to have a smoke, and said:

“Got a pipe o’ bacca you can spare, matey?”

A superfluous question, seeing that Mac’s pipe, a seasoned briar, and all his tobacco were reclining in a hiding-place known only to the Rat.

“A have na.”

“Show you the way to the canteen.”

“Wha’ for?”

“Bless yr little ’eart, what’s canteens for, eh? You can buy any bloomin’ thing you want, Hi’m tellin’ you strite you can. Hit’s a real ’ome, this is. Hi never told a lie in me pink life.”

“A’ve got na siller.”

The Rat raised his thin eyebrows incredulously.

“Garn,” he ejaculated; then, with a sly wink: “You know yr way abart town, you do; you’re nobody’s mug, you ain’t, an’ you’re right to keep dark about ’avin’ money among these blighters; w’y, they’d rob a hegg ov its shell, they would, but you can trust me wiff yr shirt. Hi ain’t no lousy furriner; Hi’m Hinglish, same as you are.”

“A’m Scotch.”

“No-o.” The Rat looked the most surprised man that ever wore a uniform. “Garn, you’re kiddin’. If you was Scotch you’d ’ave a haccent: you speak as good Hinglish as Hi do, ’struth you do.”

McGlusky did not feel flattered, and showed it.

“Lorst yr brass an’ yr ’andy things, an’ yr pipe an’ bacca? It’s them thievin’ furriners. Hi wouldn’t blame ’em fr runnin’ the rule over a civie, but hit ain’t hesprit de corpse ter go through a comrade, an’ ’im not knowin’ the ropes. Strike me pink, it’s enuff ter give a bloke what the Frenchies call hongwee.”

“Hongwee—wha’s that?” sniffed the big man.

“Well,” explained the Ring Rat, “hit’s what we call in Hingland that bloomin’ tired feelin’: when you don’t care wevver you live on th’ dole or do a ’onest night’s work wiff a skelington key an’ a jemmy in some toff’s flat in th’ West Hend. The French ain’t got no sense; hit takes a bloke a long time to make head or tail out o’ their monkey chatter; they want heducatin’, they do.”

“Iphm,” murmured Mac, looking the splinter of a man over carefully. Then, feeling the tobacco craving strong upon him, he remarked gruffly: “Ye hae’na a spare pipe an’ a bit o’ th’ weed w’ ye tha’ ye cud len’ ma until A draw some pay, eh?”

“Hi don’t go much on the lendin’ stakes; wot you lend don’t often come back, matey. Hi learnt that much in London. If you lend a bloke yr toothpick, ’e hends hup by pinchin’ yr dinner. But,” with a sudden accession of patriotism, “Hi won’t see a countryman do a perish. ’Ere’s a pipe an’ a couple o’ fills o’ what they call bacca in the Legion. Hit’s ’arf camel dung an’ ’arf ’orse ’air, an’ ’arf chopped straw wiff the juice of cigar ends an’ fags picked up in the gutter boiled in wiff it to give it a taste an’ a haroma of bacca, but it’s the bloomin’ best a soldier o’ the Legion can hafford on a carmine ’appeny a day; them Tommies in London ought to squeal abart their pay, an’ they can go hout in good old ’Yde Park any old day, an’ pick up cigar hends a hinch long.”

The Rat produced the tobacco, and Mac snatched it greedily; he could do without food or drink at a pinch, but tobacco was as the breath of life to him. He sniffed his prize, and his expression was not one of beatitude.

“A’ve smelt worse smells,” he grumbled, “in a sewer or a morgue, an’ yince when A sat between twa poleeteecians in a railway carriage, but—” His big nose wrinkled up like the muzzle of a mastiff guarding a bone.

“Hit is niffy,” acquiesced the Ring Rat, adding with his tired smile: “Hif you was to wash the feet ov a fox in that stuff, you cud go ’untin’ wiffout ’ounds; you wouldn’t need ’em, you could foller the scent yerself.”

“Wheer’s the pipe ye said ye’d lend ma?”

From somewhere in the hidden recesses of his uniform the Rat produced an ancient clay, with a stem an inch long; it was coal black, and so strong a man had to kneel on it when filling it and then hold it with both hands.

“This yr ain?” queried McGlusky.

“Hi took it from the pocket ov Paddy McShane, after ’e had ’anged his pore self. Paddy was a legionary, but ’e got hongwee so bad—fed hup, you know. ’E just ’ung his little self, an’ I ’ad to cut ’im darn an’ ’elp bury ’im, an’ when Hi was goin’ through ’is corpse to see if ’e ’ad left any relics Hi could send ’ome to his sainted mother in Cork, orl Hi could find on th’ Irish blighter was that pipe.”

“It was thochtfu’ o’ ye, ma laddie, tae theenk o’ a comrade’s mither. Did Paddy McShane tell ye she was in Cork?”

“Not ’arf ’e didn’t,” snorted the Ring Rat. “The larst time Hi ’eard ’im speak ov ’is muvver, ’e said she was in ’ell, or she orta be fr bringin’ him into a world like this. ’E said that once ’e arsked ’er who ’is farver was, which is a question no bloke oughter arsk a muvver wot ’as ’ad to go out charin’ fr a livin’, an’ she named the driver ov a car, which the Irish calls a jauntin’ car, an’ she named likewise a sailor, an’ a soldier, an’ a boardin’-’ouse runner, an’ told ’im ’e cud take ’is choice, an’ heven then ’e wasn’t satisfied. Hi never bumped into nothink so ’ard to please as the Irish: they’re never satisfied with nothink—wot?”

McGlusky, puffing at his little black pipe with its inch-long stem, listened sympathetically to Paddy McShane’s fragmentary history, and wrinkled his hooked nose at it much as he had done at the Legion tobacco.

The Ring Rat was bent upon making a good impression upon this recruit who had greatly intrigued him by the manner in which he had used the head of the Bomb as a catapult at breakfast, if the early morning meal of the Legion could be dignified by such a title. Fixing his sharp ferret eyes upon McGlusky’s face as he puffed at his pipe, the Rat remarked in his most wheedling fashion:

“Well, big ’un, wot do you fink ov the bacca?”

Mac took half a dozen more long puffs, and then said judicially:

“It’s nae sae bad as it micht be, ma laddie; it tastes like dead goat that hae died at sea an’ been washed ashore tae rot in the sun, an’ it stinks in ma nostrils like a broken promise tha’ hae fallen doon a drain, but eet micht hae been worse, eet micht hae been worse. A’ll niver smell it or taste it wi’oot theenkin’ o’ yersel’, Ring Rat.”

As McGlusky moved away, the Cockney stood scratching his head with a puzzled expression upon his wizened features. At last he murmured:

“Luv me, Hi wonder if th’ big blighter meant that as a compliment? Hif ’e did, I wonder where ’e’d go for ’is blinkin’ hinsults?”