CHAPTER XV.
"L'AMIE DU DRAPEAU." "Did I not say he would eat fire ?" "Pardieu! C'est un brave." "Rides like an Arab." "Smokes like a Zouave." "Cuts off a head with that back circular sweep--ah--h----h! magnificent!" "And dances like an Aristocrat; not like a tipsy Spahi!" The last crown to the chorus of applause, and insult to the circle of applauders, was launched with all the piquance of inimitable canteen-slang and camp-assurance, from a speaker who had perched astride on a broken fragment of wall, with her barrel of wine set up on end on the stones in front of her, and her six soldiers, her gros bebees, as she was given maternally to calling them, lounging at their ease on the arid, dusty turf below.

She was very pretty, audaciously pretty, though her skin was burned to a bright sunny brown, and her hair was cut as short as a boy's, and her face had not one regular feature in it.

But then--regularity! who wanted it, who would have thought the most pure classic type a change for the better, with those dark, dancing, challenging eyes; with that arch, brilliant, kitten-like face, so sunny, so mignon, and those scarlet lips like a bud of camellia that were never so handsome as when a cigarette was between them, or sooth to say, not seldom a short pipe itself?
She was pretty, she was insolent, she was intolerably coquettish, she was mischievous as a marmoset; she would swear, if need be, like a Zouave; she could fire galloping, she could toss off her brandy or her vermouth like a trooper; she would on occasion clinch her little brown hand and deal a blow that the recipient would not covet twice; she was an enfant de Paris and had all its wickedness at her fingers; she would sing you guinguette songs till you were suffocated with laughter, and she would dance the cancan at the Salle de Mars, with the biggest giant of a Cuirassier there.

And yet with all that, she was not wholly unsexed; with all that she had the delicious fragrance of youth, and had not left a certain feminine grace behind her, though she wore a vivandiere's uniform, and had been born in a barrack, and meant to die in a battle; it was the blending of the two that made her piquante, made her a notoriety in her own way; known at pleasure, and equally, in the Army of Africa as "Cigarette," and "L'Amie du Drapeau." "Not like a tipsy Spahi!" It was a cruel cut to her gros bebees, mostly Spahis, lying there at her feet, or rather at the foot of the wall, singing the praises--with magnanimity beyond praise--of a certain Chasseur d'Afrique.
"Ho, Cigarette!" growled a little Zouave, known as Tata Leroux.

"That is the way thou forsakest thy friends for the first fresh face." "Well, it is not a face like a tobacco-stopper, as thine is, Tata!" responded Cigarette, with a puff of her namesake; the repartee of the camp is apt to be rough.