our eloquent friend a very sharp crack on the head with my heavy matrack stick. . . . He let out one word and sprang to his feet. The hood of my dirty burnous was well over my ingenuous countenance and the evening was growing dark, but I got a clear glimpse of his face, and then fled for my life. . . . I am a good runner, as you know, and I had learned what I wanted--or most of it."
I waited, deeply interested, while Raoul paused and smiled at me.
"When a man has an exclamation fairly knocked out of him, so to speak, that exclamation will be in his mother-tongue," continued Raoul. "And if a man has, at times, a very slight cast in his eye, that cast is much enhanced and emphasized in a moment of sudden shock, fright, anger or other violent emotion."
"True," I agreed.
"My friend," said Raoul, "that man's exclamation, when I hit him, was 'Himmel!' and, as he turned round, there was a most pronounced cast in his left eye. He almost squinted, in fact. . . ."
"The former point is highly interesting," I observed. "What of the other?"
"Henri," replied Raoul. "Do you remember a man who--let me see--had dirty finger-nails, ate garlic, jerked his horse's mouth, had a German mother, wiped his nose with the back of his hand, revealed a long dog-tooth when he grinned sideways, and had a cast in his eye? . . . A man in the Blue Hussars, a dozen years and more ago? . . . Eh, do you?"
"Becque!" I exclaimed.
"Becque, I verily believe," said Raoul.
"But wouldn't he exclaim in French, under such sudden and violent shock?" I demurred.
"Not if he had been bred and born speaking the German of his German mother in Alsace," replied my friend. "German would be literally his mother-tongue. He would learn from his French father to speak perfect French, and we know that his parents were of the two nationalities."
"It may be Becque, of course," I said doubtfully.
"I believe it is he," replied Raoul, "and I also believe you're the man to make certain. . . . What about continuing that little duel--with no Sergeant Blüm to interrupt, eh?"
"If it is he, and I can manage it, the duel will be taken up at the point where it was stopped owing to circumstances beyond Monsieur Becque's control," I remarked.
"Yes. I think ce bon Becque ought to die," smiled Raoul, "as a traitor, a renegade and a spy. . . . For those things he is--as the French-born son of a Frenchman, and as a soldier who has worn the uniform of France and taken the oath of true and faithful service to the Republic."
"Where was he born?" I asked.
"Paris," replied Raoul. "Bred and born in Paris. He was known to the police as a criminal and an anarchist from his youth, and it appears that he got into the Blue Hussars by means of stolen or forged papers in this name of Becque. . . . They lost sight of him after he had served his sentence for incitement to mutiny in the Blue Hussars. . . ."
And we talked on far into the night in Sidi Ibrahim Maghruf's great moonlit garden.
Next day, Raoul departed on his journey of terrible hardships--a camel-man in the employ of Sidi Ibrahim Maghruf, to Lake Tchad and Timbuktu, with his life in his hands and all his notes and observations to be kept in his head.
§ 4
Of the man who might or might not be Becque, I saw nothing whatever in Zaguig. He may have taken fright at Raoul's sudden and inexplicable assault upon him, and thought that his secret was discovered, or he may have departed by reason of the approach of the French forces. On the other hand he may merely have gone away to report upon the situation in Zaguig, or again, he may have been in the place the whole time.
Anyhow, I got no news nor trace of him, and soon dismissed him from my mind. In due course I was relieved in turn by Captain de Lannec and returned to Morocco, and was sent thence into the far south, ostensibly to organize Mounted Infantry companies out of mules and the Foreign Legion, but really to do a little finding-out and a little intelligence-organizing in the direction of the territories of our various southern neighbours, and to travel from Senegal to Wadai, with peeps into Nigeria and the Cameroons. I was in the Soudan a long while.
Here I had some very instructive experiences, and a very weird one at a place called Zinderneuf, whence I went on leave via Nigeria, actually travelling home with a most excellent Briton named George Lawrence, who had been my very senior and revered fag-master at Eton!
It is a queer little world, and very amusing.
* * *
And everywhere I went, the good Dufour, brave, staunch and an extraordinarily clever mimic of any kind of native, went also, "seconded for special service in the Intelligence Department"--and invaluable service it was. At disguise and dialect he was as good as, if not better than, myself; and it delighted me to get him still further decorated and promoted as he deserved.
And so Fate, my uncle, and my own hard, dangerous and exciting work, brought me to the great adventure of my life, and to the supreme failure that rewarded my labours at the crisis of my career.
Little did I dream what awaited me when I got the laconic message from my uncle (now Commander-in-Chief and Governor-General):
"Return forthwith to Zaguig and wait instructions."
Zaguig, as I knew to my sorrow, was a "holy" city, and like most holy cities, was tenanted by some of the unholiest scum of mankind that pollute the earth.
Does not the Arab proverb itself say, "The holier the city, the wickeder its citizens"?
Chapter VII.
Zaguig
After the cities of Morocco, the Enchantress, I hated going back to Zaguig, the last-won and least-subdued of our Saharan outposts of civilization; and after the bold Moor I hated the secretive, furtive, evil Zaguigans, who reminded me of the fat, fair and false Fezai.
Not that Zaguig could compare with Fez or Marrakesh, of course, that bright jewel sunk in its green ocean of palms, with its wonderful gardens, Moorish architecture, cool marble, bright tiles, fountains and charming hidden patios.
This Zaguig (now occupied by French troops) was an ash-heap populated with vermin, and very dangerous vermin, too.
I did not like the position of affairs at all. I did not like the careless over-confident attitude of Colonel Levasseur; I did not like the extremely scattered disposition of the small garrison, a mere advance-guard; and I did not like the fact that Miss Mary Hankinson Vanbrugh was, with her brother, the guest of the said Colonel Levasseur.
You see, I knew what was going on beneath the surface, and what I did not know from personal observation, Dufour could tell me.
(When I was not Major de Beaujolais, I was a water-carrier, and when Dufour was not Adjudant Dufour of the Spahis, he was a seller of dates and melons in the suq. When I was here before, I had been a blind leper--when not a coolie in the garden of Sidi Ibrahim Maghruf, the friend of France.)
Nor
