ON THE STATION PLATFORM

They dined together in a glass-fronted restaurant opening out on to the terrace, and Sanda was sweet, but absent-minded. Max could guess where her thoughts were, and almost hated Stanton. How could the man let some wretched engagement, with a few French officers, keep him from this poor little girl who adored him? How could Stanton let her go alone to meet her unnatural father (it was thus that Max thought of Colonel DeLisle) when as her one-time guardian he might have taken her to Sidi-bel-AbbÉs himself, and persuaded his old friend, DeLisle, to be lenient. All that Max had heard against the explorer came back to him, and he was ready to believe Stanton the cruel and selfish egoist that gossip sketched him. Poor Sanda!

Miss DeLisle had meant to finish her long journey as she had begun it, second-class; but Max persuaded the girl to let him take for her a first-class ticket, with coupÉ lit, in a compartment for women, as far as the station where at dawn they must change for Sidi-bel-AbbÉs. She was surprised at the smallness of the price, but did not suspect that she owed her new friend anything more substantial than gratitude for all the trouble he had taken for her comfort.

Max himself went second-class, packed in with seven men who would have thought opening the window a symptom of insanity.

One of the seven was the man with whom Sanda DeLisle had chatted on board the General Morel at dinner. He was the hero of the compartment, for he was going to Sidi-bel-AbbÉs to fight a boxing match with the champion of the Legion, a soldier named Pelle. Four of the travellers (three men of Algiers and a youth of Sidi-bel-AbbÉs) were accompanying the French boxer, having met him at the ship.

Dozing and waking, Max heard excited talk of la boxe and the coming event. He was vaguely interested, for he had been the champion boxer of his regiment—a hundred years ago!—but he was too weary in body and mind to care much about a match at Sidi-bel-AbbÉs. When he was not trying to sleep, he was mentally composing a letter to his colonel, with discreet explanations, and a justification of his forthcoming immediate resignation from the army: or else a written explanation of his farewell to Billie, following up the telegram; or thinking out business directions to Edwin Reeves. Suddenly, however, as he was dully wondering how best to send the heiress to New York without going back himself, a name spoken almost in his ear had the blinding effect of a searchlight upon his brain.

"La petite Josephine Delatour," said the young man who lived at Bel-AbbÉs. He was evidently answering some question which Max had not caught.

"The handsomest, would you call her?" disputed a commercial traveller, who also knew the town. "Ah, that, no! she is too strange, too bizarre."

"But her strangeness is her charm, mon ami! She has eyes of topaz, like those of a young panther. If she were not bizarre, would she—a little nobody at all—be strong enough to draw the smart young officers after her? There are girls in Bel-AbbÉs, daughters of rich merchants, who are jealous of the secretary at the Hotel Splendide. Before she came, it was only the officers of high rank who messed there. Now it is also the lieutenants. It is not the food, but Mademoiselle Josephine who attracts!"

"Once upon a time she thought me and my comrades good enough for a flirtation," said the commercial traveller. "But she looks higher in these days, especially since her namesake in the Spahis joined his regiment at Bel-AbbÉs. She told me they had found out that they were cousins."

"The lieutenant doesn't go about boasting of the relationship," laughed the youth from Bel-AbbÉs. "He comes to my father's cafÉ, which is the best in the town, as you well know. If any one speaks to him of la petite, he laughs: and it is a laugh she would not like."

Max's ears tingled. He felt as if he were eavesdropping. He wished to hear more, though at the same time it seemed that he had no right to listen. Luckily or unluckily, the boxer broke in and changed the subject.

Early in the morning, passengers for Sidi-bel-AbbÉs had to descend from the train going on to Oran, and take a slow one, on a branch line. It was a very slow one, indeed, and it was also late, so that it would be nearly midday and the hour for dejeuner when they reached their destination. Max saw himself inquiring for Mademoiselle Delatour just at the moment when the admirers of her topaz eyes were assembling for their meal. He did not like the prospect; but said nothing of his own worries to Sanda, whom he joined on changing trains. Now the meeting with her father was so near, she had to hold her courage with both hands. She had realized for the first time that she would not know where to look for Colonel DeLisle. He might be in barracks. She could hardly go to him there. He would perhaps be angry, should a girl arrive, announcing herself as his daughter, at the house where he had rooms. The third alternative was the Hotel Splendide, where he took his meals. He might already be there when she reached Sidi-bel-AbbÉs. What a place for a first meeting! Max agreed, sympathetically. It seemed that everything at Sidi-bel-AbbÉs must happen at the Hotel Splendide!

"If you could only be with me and help, as you have helped me all along!" she sighed. "Though of course you can't. If Sir Knight had come—— But I couldn't easily explain you to my father. At least, not just at present."

Max saw this, even more clearly than she saw it. It would indeed be difficult for a strange new daughter to explain in a few brief words a still more strange young man to such a person as Colonel DeLisle. If he were to be introduced or even mentioned at all, Max felt that it would have to be later, and must depend on the word of the redoubtable colonel. He suggested to Sanda as discreetly as he could that he would keep out of her way at the hotel, unless she summoned him. But, he added, he would have to be there for a short time at all events, because his business was taking him precisely to the Hotel Splendide.

"The person you're looking for is staying there?" asked Sanda.

"She's the secretary of the hotel." Max hesitated an instant, then, realizing from the words he had overheard how conspicuous a character Josephine Delatour evidently was, he thought best to tell Sanda something more of his story than he had told her yet. He sketched the version, vindicating his foster-mother, which he had given to Billie Brookton and the Reeveses—a version which all the world at home would, he believed, soon hear.

"So that is it?" said Sanda. "You're giving up everything to this girl. Do you think she will take it?"

"I wish I were as sure of what I shall do next as I am sure of that," laughed Max. If there had ever been any doubt in his mind as to Josephine's attitude, it had vanished while listening to the talk of her in the train.

"I know what you ought to do next," Sanda said. "You ought to be what you have been—a soldier."

"I shall always be, at heart, I think," Max confessed. "But soldier life is over for me, so far as I can see ahead."

"I wonder——" she began eagerly, then stopped abruptly.

"You wonder—what?"

"I daren't say it."

"Please dare."

"I mustn't. It would be wrong. I might be horribly sorry afterward. And yet——"

She silenced herself with a little gasp. He urged her no more, but stared almost unseeingly out of the window at the roofed farmhouses, and the yellow hills, like reclaimed desert, with bright patches of cultivation, and a far, floating background of the blue Thesala mountains.

Sidi-bel-AbbÉs at last! and the train slowing down along the platform of an insignificant station, which might have been in the South of France, save for a few burnoused Arabs. There was a green glimpse of olives and palms, and taller plane trees, under a serene sky; and in the distance the high fortified walls of yellow and dark gray stone, which ringed in the northernmost stronghold of the Foreign Legion.

"Sidi-bel-AbbÉs!" a deep voice shouted musically from one end of the platform to the other, as the train came in; and the name thrilled through Max Doran's veins as it had not ceased to thrill since yesterday. More strongly than ever he had the impression that some great things would happen to him here, or begin to happen, and carry him on elsewhere, beyond those yellow hills. Deep down in him excitement stirred in the dark, like a dazed traveller up before the dawn, groping for the door through which he must pass to begin his journey. All the more quietly, however, because of what he secretly felt, Max took Sanda's bag and his own, and gave her a hand for the high step from the train to platform. There they became units in a crowd strange to see at a little provincial station; a crowd to be met at few other places in the world.

The French boxer was not the only guest of importance this train brought to Sidi-bel-AbbÉs. At the far end of the platform, where the first-class carriages had stopped, a group of officers in full dress were collected round a man who wore civilian clothes awkwardly, as an old soldier wears them. There was the sensationally splendid costume of the Spahis; scarlet cloak and full trousers; the beautiful pale blue of the Chasseurs d'Afrique, and a plainer uniform which Max guessed to be that of the Foreign Legion. The boxer had his committee de rÉception also; a dozen or more dark, fat, loud-talking proprietors of cafÉs, or tradefolk keen on "le sport." These, and the lounging Arabs, might have interested strangers to Sidi-bel-AbbÉs, if there had been nothing better worth attention. But owing to the lateness of the train, it had come in almost simultaneously with another made up of windowless wagons for men, horses or freight, which had not yet discharged its load. Out from the wide doorway of the long car labelled "32 hommes, 6 chevaux," was streaming an extraordinary procession; tall, bearded men with the high cheek-bones and sad, wide-apart eyes of the Slav: a blond, round-cheeked boy whose shy yet stolid face could only have been bred in Germany, or Alsace; sharp-featured, rat-eyed fellows who might have been collected at Montmartre or in a Marseilles slum; others who were nondescripts of no complexion and no expression; waifs from anywhere; a brown-skinned Spaniard and an Italian or two; a Negro with the sophisticated look of a New York "darkee"; a melancholy, hooded Arab, and a fierce-faced Moor; types utterly at variance, yet with one likeness which bound them together like a convict's chain: weariness and stains of long, hard travelling, which thrust the few well-dressed men down to the level of the shabbiest. Some were almost middle aged; some were youths hardly yet at the regulation enlistment age of eighteen; a few one might take for broken-down gentlemen; more who looked like workmen out of a job, and one or two unmistakably old soldiers, eager-eyed as lost dogs who had found their way home: a strange gathering of individuals to find stumbling out of a freight train at a country station of a French colony; but this was Sidi-bel-AbbÉs, headquarters of La Legion EtrangÉre: and as the tired, dirty men tumbled out on to the platform, everybody stared openly as a corporal with a high kÉpi, a buttoned-back blue overcoat, and loose, red trousers tucked into military boots, formed the crew into lines of four.

Even the officers at the end of the platform gazed at the soiled scarecrows who had to be made into soldiers: for this being Sidi-bel-AbbÉs, there was no difficulty in guessing that the twenty-eight or thirty men of six or seven nations were recruits of the Legion of Foreigners. The draggled throng was quietly indicated to the visitor in civilian clothes, who nodded appreciatively and then turned away. But the boxer's brigade explained the unfortunate wretches so loudly and unflatteringly to their guest that haggard faces flushed and quivering lips stiffened; while at the gateway of exit, a motionless row of non-commissioned officers, watching for deserters, regarded "les bleus" critically, yet indifferently.

Max, whose quick imagination made him almost painfully sensitive for others, felt hot and sorry for the men herded together by misfortune. He had read sensational stories of the Foreign Legion, and found himself hypnotized into looking for brutal jowls of escaped murderers, or faces of pallid aristocrats in torn evening clothes, splashed with blood. Among these men of mystery or sorrow there were, however, few startling types which caught the eye. But one man—young, tall, straight as an arrow—running the gauntlet of jokes and stares with fierce, repressed defiance, turned suddenly to look at Max and Sanda.

Where to place him in life, Max could not tell. He might be prince or peasant by birth, since prince and peasant are akin at heart, and ever remote from the middle-classes as from Martians. He wore a soft, gray felt hat, smeared with coal-dust from the engine. The collar of his dusty black overcoat was turned up; it actually looked like an evening coat. His trousers were black too, and Max had an impression of patent leather shoes glittering through dust. But these details were only accessories to the picture, and interesting because of the wearer's face. It was dark as that of a Spaniard from Andalusia, with the high, proud features of an Indian. It had been clean-shaven a few days ago; and from two haggard hollows a pair of wild black eyes flashed one glance at Max—the only man who had not seemed to stare. Face and look were unforgettable. It seemed to Max that some appeal had been flung to him. He could hardly keep himself from striding after the tall figure, to ask: "What is it you want me to do?" And Sanda also had been impressed. He heard her murmur under her breath, "Poor man! What wonderful eyes!"

Nobody moved from the platform until the corporal had called the roll of names—German, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Arab—and had marched his batch of recruits briskly through the guarded gate. Max would have hurried Sanda out directly behind them, before the crowd could secure all the queer, old-fashioned cabs which were waiting, but at that moment the smart group of officers moved forward. Having shown their guest one of the sights of Sidi-bel-AbbÉs, they evidently expected to take precedence of the townspeople, who gave no sign of disputing their right. Max, following the example of others and resisting an impulse to salute, stood back with his companion to let the uniforms pass. Sanda, pink with excitement, was as usual all unconscious of self, and vividly interested both in recruits and officers. The latter, especially the young ones, were equally interested in the pretty, well-dressed girl, a stranger in Sidi-bel-AbbÉs and the one woman on the platform.

Max saw the polite but admiring glances, and would have liked to draw her further away. He bent down to whisper a suggestion, but Sanda did not hear. Her face, her whole personality, had undergone one of those swift changes characteristic of her.

With a fluttering cry, she started forward, then stepped nervously back, and, stumbling against Max's foot, would have fallen if he had not caught her.

All his attention was for her, yet, with his eyes on the girl, he suddenly became conscious that something had happened among the officers. One man had stopped abruptly just in front of Sanda, while others were going through the gate, hurrying on as if tactfully desirous to get themselves out of the way. A voice murmured "Mon Dieu!" and having steadied Sanda, Max saw standing close to them a small, rather dapper man with a lined brown face, a very square, smooth-shaven jaw, long gray eyes, short gray hair, and the neat slimness of a West Point cadet. He had on his sleeve the five gold stripes signifying a colonel's rank, and was decorated with several medals.

Instantly Max understood the situation. The one thing that ought not to have happened, had happened.