CHAPTER VII
THE SHEEP IN WOLF'S CLOTHING
LÉGIONNAIRE JOHN BULL at on the edge of his cot at the hour of astiquage. Though his body was in the chambrée of the Seventh Company, his mind, as usual, was in England, and his thoughts, as usual, played around the woman whom he knew as Marguerite, and the world as Lady Huntingten.
What could he do next year when his third and last period of Legion service expired? Where could he possibly hide in such inviolable anonymity that there was no possible chance of any rumour arising that the dead Sir Montague Merline was in the land of the living? … How had it happened that he had survived the wounds and disease that he had suffered in Tonkin, Madagascar, Dahomey, and the Sahara—the stake-trap pit into which he had fallen at Nha-Nam—the bullet in his neck from the Malagasy rifle—the hack from the coupe-coupe which had split his collar-bone in that ghastly West African jungle—the lance-thrust that had torn his arm from elbow to shoulder at Elsefra?
It was an absolute and undeniable fact that the man who desired to die in battle could never do it; while he who had everything to live for, was among the first to fall. If they went South again to-morrow and were cut up in a sudden Arab razzia, he would
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