“An army's just a machine, sir, in course,” he concluded, as he rammed in the Turkish tobacco. “But then it's a live machine, for all that; and each little bit of it feels for itself, like the joints in an eel's body. Now, if only one of them little bits smarts, the whole creature goes wrong--there's the mischief.” Bel-a-faire-peur listened thoughtfully to his comrade where he lay flung full-length on the skins. “I dare say you are right enough. I knew nothing of my men when--when I was in England; we none of us did; but I can very well believe what you say. Yet--fine fellows though they are here, they are terrible blackguards!” “In course they are, sir; they wouldn't be such larky company unless they was. But what I say is that they're scamps who're told they may be great men, if they like; not scamps who're told that, because they've once gone to the devil, they must always keep there. It makes all the difference in life.” “Yes--it makes all the difference in life, whether hope is left, or--left out!” The words were murmured with a half smile that had a dash of infinite sadness in it; the other looked at him quickly with a shadow of keen pain passing over the bright, frank, laughing features of his sunburned face; he knew that the brief words held the whole history of a life. “Won't there never be no hope, sir?” he whispered, while his voice trembled a little under the long, fierce sweep of his yellow mustaches. The Chasseur rallied himself with a slight, careless laugh; the laugh with which he had met before now the onslaught of charges ferocious as those of the magnificent day of Mazagran. “Whom for? Both of us? Oh, yes; very likely we shall achieve fame and die! A splendid destiny.” “No, sir,” said the other, with the hesitation still in the quiver of his voice. “You know I meant, no hope of your ever being again----” He stopped, he scarcely knew how to phrase the thoughts he was thinking. The other moved with a certain impatience. “How often must I tell you to forget that I was ever anything except a soldier of France?--forget as I have forgotten it!” The audacious, irrepressible “Crache-au-nez-d'la-Mort,” whom nothing could daunt and nothing could awe, looked penitent and ashamed as a chidden spaniel. “I know, sir. I have tried, many a year; but I thought, perhaps, as how his lordship's death--” “No life and no death can make any difference to me, except the death that some day an Arbico's lunge will give me; and that is a long time coming.” “Ah, for God's sake, Mr. Cecil, don't talk like this!” The Chasseur gave a short, sharp shiver, and started at this name, as if a bullet had struck him. “Never say that again!” Rake, Algerian-christened “Crache-au-nez-d'la-Mort,” stammered a contrite apology. “I never have done, sir--not for never a year; but it wrung it out of me like--you talking of wanting death in that way----”