“Superb!” said the General, with a grim significance. “Twelve years! In five under Napoleon, he would have been at the head of a brigade; but then”--and the veteran drank his absinthe with a regretful melancholy--“but then, Napoleon read his men himself and never read them wrong. It is a divine gift, that, for commanders.” “The Black Hawk can read, too,” said Chanrellon meditatively; but it was the “petit nom,” that Chateauroy had gained long before, and by which he was best known through the army. “No eyes are keener than his to trace a lascar kebir. But, where he hates, he strikes beak and talons--pong!--till the thing drops dead--even where he strikes a bird of his own brood.” “That is bad,” said the old General sententiously. “There are four people who should have no personal likes or dislikes; they are an innkeeper, a schoolmaster, a ship's skipper, and a military chief.” With which axiom he called for some more vert-vert. Meanwhile, the Chasseur went his way through the cosmopolitan groups of the great square. A little farther onward, laughing, smoking, chatting, eating ices outside a Cafe Chantant, were a group of Englishmen--a yachting party, whose schooner lay in the harbor. He lingered a moment; and lighted a fusee, just for the sake of hearing the old familiar words. As he bent his head, no one saw the shadow of pain that passed over his face. But one of them looked at him curiously and earnestly. “The deuce,” he murmured to the man nearest him, “who the dickens is it that French soldier's like?” The French soldier heard, and, with the cigar in his teeth, moved away quickly. He was uneasy in the city--uneasy lest he should be recognized by any passer-by or tourist. “I need not fear that, though,” he thought with a smile. “Ten years!--why, in that world, we used to forget the blackest ruin in ten days, and the best life among us ten hours after its grave was closed. Besides, I am safe enough. I am dead!” And he pursued his onward way, with the red glow of the cigar under the chestnut splendor of his beard, and the black eyes of veiled women flashed lovingly on his tall, lithe form, with the scarlet undress fez set on his forehead, fair as a woman's still, despite the tawny glow of the African sun that had been on it for so long. He was “dead”; therein had lain all his security; thereby had “Beauty of the Brigades” been buried beyond all discovery in “Bel-a-faire-peur” of the 2nd Chasseurs d'Afrique. When, on the Marseilles rails, the maceration and slaughter of as terrible an accident as ever befell a train rushing through the midnight darkness, at headlong speed, had left himself and the one man faithful to his fortunes unharmed by little less than a miracle; he had seen in the calamity the surest screen from discovery or pursuit.