and strike the dog and the little dog,—
meaning the great chief and his secretary.
He recognised Mamar by the help of the
illumination from the flashes of the muskets;
breaking the window-sash of the coupé with
the butt-end of his pistol. As for the Kodja
himself, he declared that he went to strike;
but it was not the will of God that he should
kill anybody. When Mamar said to the
captain: "All is over," Doineau cried,
"Separate!"

When public rumour accused El Mamar,
the jackal, Captain Doineau said to his
kodja:

"Go to Bel Kheir and tell him he must
find witnesses to prove the alibi of Mamar,
even if he should have to pay for them."

The jackal was thereupon collusively
arrested, the witnesses were duly found, and
duly paid for, and the alibi having been duly
sworn, Mamar was released.

During the flight of Bel Hadj the captain
employed his secretary to write a letter to
him, which contained this expression, "we
have patched up everything—demolished
everything;" meaning he might return with
confidence as they have taken their precautions.

The constitution of the Arabian offices
being an element of great importance in this
affair, I may briefly mention here what I
have learnt respecting their functions. When
the Turks gained Algeria, their regime
might be described as piracy on the sea,
and brigandage upon land. The Turks
employed the native Arabs to plunder their
countrymen in the interest of the Ottoman
conquerors. When the French drove out
the Turks, they began to establish a system,
which pretended, and appeared, to be an
improvement upon the Turkish system.
They made laws abolishing presents; they
ordered that all the proceedings of the
public authorities should be made public. The
poll tax, the flock tax, the tent tax, and the
palm tax were ordered to be assessed
by Arabian chiefs, and verified by a French
officer, called the chief of the Arabian Office,
A consulting committee and the Governor
General finally arranged and fixed the fiscal
lists. Nobody except the officer in command
of the district had the right to impose fines
or levy blackmail—called euphoniously military
contributions—and the general was bound
to give an immediate and full account of
the proceeds to the agent of the treasury;
who divided them between the State budget
and the Algerian budget. The Governor
General alone had the right by law of ordering
summary executions; and he could not
legally delegate this power, and was obliged
to report immediately every exercise of it
to the minister of war. But all these rules
were constantly broken by subordinates, and
Abdallah's accusation against Doineau was,
that he governed in all respects like the worst
of the Turkish pachas. With more frankness
than prudence; with a simplicity rare in
men of mature years of the most out-spoken
races, Abdallah announced everywhere—even
to Doineau himself—his intention of
complaining to the superior authorities of his
rapacities and atrocities. Never, certainly,
in modern times has an officer of a European
army been accused of a similar combination
of crimes. If M. Cartouche had been made
a Turkish pacha, he probably would have
subjected himself to the accusation brought
against Captain Doineau. Abdallah accused
Doineau of extravagant debaucheries,
arbitrary exactions, levies of blackmail, unauthorised
raids and murder, mildly indicated by
the term, "summary executions." Therefore
the motive for the murder is easily found
in Doineau's habitual and unscrupulous abuse
of the power confided in him. He was a
thorough despot in the Tlemcen district.
He stuck at nothing to plunder and terrify
the Arabs; and, knowing that Abdallah was
on his way to Oran to denounce, in other
words, to ruin him, he took the short and
decisive way of silencing his accuser.

The widow of Abdallah said in court her
husband had told her one reason of the
preference which Doineau accorded the Arabian
chiefs who associated with him was their
subserviency to his debaucheries.

Doineau, who had no private fortune,
received in all, as captain and as director, about
four pounds a-week, and yet he gambled,
losing his hundred pounds a-night sometimes,
and showered jewels upon the companions of
his pleasures with the magnificence of an
Oriental sultan. He pretended to be so poor,
that, being one day with a brother-officer, he
said, in great agitation, that he had lost his
portmonnaie, containing all his fortune; ten
or twelve pounds. But, when the contents of a
certain casket, which his secretary had buried,
were detected, they were found to consist
of seventeen thousand francs. A carefully
sealed packet was also discovered in the
house of the sphahis Boukra, addressed by
Doineau to his brother at Algiers, which
contained bank-notes and bills for twenty-one
thousand francs. Doineau had ordered it to
be put into the post, but Boukra had kept it.
This sum of more than sixteen hundred
pounds was not likely to have been saved out
of his pay.

The sources of this wealth were laid bare
at the trial. Some of the Arabs are, it
appears, in the habit of concealing their corn in
pits, with a view to diminish the taxes imposed
upon them. According to law, these hoards
were not to be confiscated when discovered;
only the taxes upon the corn were to be
exacted, and fines imposed for the concealment.
Captain Doineau would not deny,
when questioned on his trial, that he had
confiscated many grain-pits, to the amount in
value of seven thousand francs. The Hadj
may have seized a wheat-pit and a barley-
pit of El Mokadem of the Oould-Rials tribe,