An hour after noon, Jacques, wounded in the arm and knocked out by a
blow on the head, lay on the sands recovering his scattered wits. A
hundred paces or so away lay Corporal Zeiss, whilst advancing towards
the two men came the form of a woman.
An Arab woman.
Her tribe was half destroyed.
She had followed close on the heels of the attacking hosts with
others of her kind, sure of victory and the delightful prospect of
mutilating the wounded in unnameable ways.
Caught in the _débâcle_ and, by a miracle, unscathed, she was now
pursuing her true vocation in life, just as, close to battlefields,
one may see the peasant ploughman at work or the gleaner gleaning.
She was in search of plunder without the least idea as to how the
plunder would profit her or how she was ever to regain her tribe.
She knelt down beside Zeiss.
Jacques, now fully recovered, watched.
He knew Zeiss at once by his flax-coloured hair.
The woman's back was towards Jacques, and turning on his left side he
seized his rifle, found that it was loaded, and then, with an Apache
grin on his face, turned on his stomach and lay with the rifle to his
shoulder, ready to fire, just as he had often lain on the practice
ground.
The woman stood up, the shot rang out and she fell.
Then Jacques, rifle in hand, rose up, and still rather shaky from the
result of his injuries, approached the two figures lying on the sand.
Zeiss was dead and the woman was dead, and her plunder lay on the
sand in the form of Zeiss' ears, Zeiss' earrings, and other things
belonging to Zeiss.
She was comely. It only wanted that fact to complete the
satisfaction of Corporal Jacques. For the first time since his
betrayal he felt at ease. Zeiss was no longer a thorn in his flesh,
and he had revenged himself on Mimi.
"On Mimi?" you will say.
Well, on her sex.
It is the same thing--or at least it was the same thing to Jacques.
He stood shading his eyes against the sun whilst the wind of the
desert blowing in his face brought the far-off bugle calls of the
Legion.
The hounds were being collected.
The battue was over.