Chương Chương 32 · VI. Bagged him at Last.

. VI. Bagged him at Last.

IT was not until early on the morrow of this adventurous and dramatic

eve that our hero awoke, and acquired assurance doubly sure that the

prince and the treasure had really gone off, without any prospect

of return. When he saw himself alone in the little white tombhouse,

betrayed, robbed, abandoned in the heart of savage Algeria, with a

one-humped camel and some pocket-money as all his resources, then did

the representative of Tarascon for the first time doubt. He doubted

Montenegro, friendship, glory, and even lions; and the great man

blubbered bitterly.

Whilst he was pensively seated on the sill of the sanctuary, holding

his head between his hands and his gun between his legs, with the

camel mooning at him, the thicket over the way was divided, and the

stupor-stricken Tartarin saw a gigantic lion appear not a dozen paces

off. It thrust out its high head and emitted powerful roars, which made

the temple walls shake beneath their votive decorations, and even the

saint’s slippers dance in their niche.

The Tarasconian alone did not tremble.

“At last you’ve come!” he shouted, jumping up and levelling the rifle.

Bang, bang! went a brace of shells into its head.

It was done. For a minute, on the fiery background of the African sky,

there was a dreadful firework display of scattered brains, smoking

blood, and tawny hair. When all fell, Tartarin perceived two colossal

Negroes furiously running towards him, brandishing cudgels. They were

his two Negro acquaintances of Milianah!

Oh, misery!

This was the domesticated lion, the poor blind beggar of the Mohammed

Monastery, whom the Tarasconian’s bullets had knocked over.

This time, spite of Mahound, Tartarin escaped neatly. Drunk with

fanatical fury, the two African collectors would have surely beaten him

to pulp had not the god of chase and war sent him a delivering angel

in the shape of the rural constable of the Orleansville commune. By a

bypath this garde champetre came up, his sword tucked under his arm.

The sight of the municipal cap suddenly calmed the Negroes’ choler.

Peaceful and majestic, the officer with the brass badge drew up a report

on the affair, ordered the camel to be loaded with what remained of the

king of beasts, and the plaintiffs as well as the delinquent to follow

him, proceeding to Orleansville, where all was deposited with the

law-courts receiver.

There issued a long and alarming case!

After the Algeria of the native tribes which he had overrun, Tartarin of

Tarascon became thence acquainted with another Algeria, not less weird

and to be dreaded--the Algeria in the towns, surcharged with lawyers and

their papers. He got to know the pettifogger who does business at the

back of a cafe--the legal Bohemian with documents reeking of wormwood

bitters and white neckcloths spotted with champoreau; the ushers, the

attorneys, all the locusts of stamped paper, meagre and famished, who

eat up the colonist body and boots--ay, to the very straps of them, and

leave him peeled to the core like an Indian cornstalk, stripped leaf by

leaf.

Before all else it was necessary to ascertain whether the lion had been

killed on the civil or the military territory. In the former case the

matter regarded the Tribunal of Commerce; in the second, Tartarin

would be dealt with by the Council of War: and at the mere name the

impressionable Tarasconian saw himself shot at the foot of the ramparts

or huddled up in a casemate-silo.

The puzzle lay in the limitation of the two territories being very hazy

in Algeria.

At length, after a month’s running about, entanglements, and waiting

under the sun in the yards of Arab Departmental offices, it was

established that, whereas the lion had been killed on the military

territory, on the other hand Tartarin was in the civil territory when he

shot. So the case was decided in the civil courts, and our hero was

let off on paying two thousand five hundred francs damages, costs not

included.

How could he pay such a sum?

The few piashtres escaped from the prince’s sweep had long since gone in

legal documents and judicial libations. The unfortunate lion-destroyer

was therefore reduced to selling the store of guns by retail, rifle by

rifle; so went the daggers, the Malay kreeses, and the life-preservers.

A grocer purchased the preserved aliments; an apothecary what remained

of the medicaments. The big boots themselves walked off after the

improved tent to a dealer of curiosities, who elevated them to the

dignity of “rarities from Cochin-China.”

When everything was paid up, only the lion’s skin and the camel remained

to Tartarin. The hide he had carefully packed, to be sent to Tarascon

to the address of brave Commandant Bravida, and, later on, we shall

see what came of this fabulous trophy. As for the camel, he reckoned on

making use of him to get back to Algiers, not by riding on him, but by

selling him to pay his coach-fare--the best way to employ a camel in

travelling. Unhappily the beast was difficult to place, and no one would

offer a copper for him.

Still Tartarin wanted to regain Algiers by hook or crook. He was in

haste again to behold Baya’s blue bodice, his little snuggery and his

fountains, as well as to repose on the white trefoils of his little

cloister whilst awaiting money from France. So our hero did not

hesitate; distressed but not downcast, he undertook to make the journey

afoot and penniless by short stages.

In this enterprise the camel did not cast him off. The strange animal

had taken an unaccountable fancy for his master, and on seeing him leave

Orleansville, he set to striding steadfastly behind him, regulating his

pace by this, and never quitting him by a yard.

At the first outset Tartarin found this touching; such fidelity and

devotion above proof went to his heart, all the more because the

creature was accommodating, and fed himself on nothing. Nevertheless,

after a few days, the Tarasconian was worried by having this glum

companion perpetually at his heels, to remind him of his misadventures.

Ire arising, he hated him for his sad aspect, hump and gait of a goose

in harness. To tell the whole truth, he held him as his Old Man of the

Sea, and only pondered on how to shake him off; but the follower would

not be shaken off. Tartarin attempted to lose him, but the camel always

found him; he tried to outrun him, but the camel ran faster. He bade

him begone, and hurled stones at him. The camel stopped with a

mournful mien, but in a minute resumed the pursuit, and always ended by

overtaking him. Tartarin had to resign himself.

For all that, when, after eight full days of tramping, the dusty and

harassed Tarasconian espied the first white housetops of Algiers glimmer

from afar in the verdure, and when he got to the city gates on the noisy

Mustapha Avenue, amid the Zouaves, Biskris, and Mahonnais, all swarming

around him and staring at him trudging by with his camel, overtasked

patience escaped him.

“No! no!” he growled, “it is not likely! I cannot enter Algiers with

such an animal!”

Profiting by a jam of vehicles, he turned off into the fields and jumped

into a ditch. In a minute or so he saw over his head on the highway

the camel flying off with long strides and stretching his neck with a

wistful air.

Relieved of a great weight thereby, the hero sneaked out of his covert,

and entered the town anew by a circuitous path which skirted the wall of

his own little garden.