Jacques came along the quay-side, walking in a leisurely manner and smoking a cigarette. Beside the warships in the harbour there were two small barque-rigged vessels, one discharging grain, the other with closed hatches and evidently a full cargo. Jacques was walking towards the gangplank of the latter when a hand fell on his arm and, turning, he found himself face to face with Sergeant Pelletier of the military police of Sidi-bel-Abbès. "_That's_ all right," said the sergeant, releasing Jacques' arm, and placing his hand on his shoulder in a fatherly way. "And you may be thankful your uniform was returned. Whoever sold you that rig-out sent it back, left it at the barrack gates done up in a parcel. _Mon Dieu_! Jacques, but I would never have thought it of you, to play a fool's game like this! A smart légionnaire like you, time nearly expired and all. What made you?" Jacques laughed. The game had gone against him and there was no use in grumbling. His mind was engaged less on the business of arrest than on the problem of what he should do about Casmir and Choc. To regain possession of Choc he would have to give Casmir away, and Choc was condemned to death, so there was no use in regaining possession of him. So he did nothing. He lit another cigarette and, walking side by side with Pelletier, he went to the station, and twenty minutes later he was in the train returning to Sidi-bel-Abbès. At the barracks he was placed promptly under arrest, and he marched off to his cell with that terrible lightheartedness which is a legacy of the Legion inherited from Crime. As no single item of his uniform was lost he only received a month's imprisonment, and at the end of the month the Legion was marched off south where the Arabs were kicking up a dust, and hard fighting helped him to work off the stiffness caused by imprisonment. He seemed to have forgotten Casmir, who had not been recaptured, and the dog, which was never heard of again, yet in the great battle that was fought that month near the Oasis of the Five Palms, an old légionnaire--the same who told me this story--fighting beside Jacques, was amazed, even in the heat of battle, at the fury of the latter. "He was working off the dog," said the old fellow. "It is always so with the Legion, and that is what makes the Legion so terrible in battle--They are not so much fighting with the enemy, monsieur, they are bayoneting the Past, and what the Past has done to them." QUITS I