“Well, what do you think of that?” demanded Belle in amazement.
“Just when she had a husband picked out for each of you, too,” chaffed Paul. “But cheer up, girls. We’re here yet. Count on us to the last breath. You can’t lose us.”
“No such luck,” retorted Bess. “But what on earth made that man act that way?”
“It isn’t like gypsies to let good money get away from them,” said Jack, “and they must have seen from our open countenances that we were easy marks and ready to cough up.”
“Jack,” said Walter severely, “please pass up that line of chatter – I mean, please refrain from such vulgar slang. In my unregenerate days I could have stood for it – I mean, endured it – but since I have become refined it hits me on the raw – I mean, it affects me painfully.”
“Oh, stop your nonsense, you boys,” chided Cora. “Can’t you see I’m trying to think?”
“Cora’s trying to think!” exclaimed her irrepressible brother. “Heaven be praised that I have lived to see this day!”
Cora gave him a scornful glance, and Jack sagged down at the knees, pretending to wilt.
“Just how did that girl strike you?” asked Cora thoughtfully.
“A peach,” replied Jack promptly.
“A pippin – I mean, she was very good looking,” added Walter.
“I’m asking the girls,” said Cora witheringly.
“She didn’t seem to me like a gypsy at all,” answered Bess. “And yet I suppose of course she must be, since she’s here with them.”
“Did you notice the way she spoke when she was off her guard for a moment?” asked Belle. “She said that she had ‘an attack of dizziness.’ Later on, she was a ‘leetle deezy.’”
“Her eyes were blue,” remarked Cora musingly, “and that is something unusual in a gypsy.”
“But her complexion was as dark as any of the others,” objected Bess.
“That might be accounted for by the tan from the open-air life,” replied Cora. “And then, too, it would be easy to color it artificially.”
“I didn’t know girls ever did such things,” interrupted Jack with a pained expression.
“And then too,” went on Cora, unheeding, “when her sleeve fell back, I saw that her arm was white. But what I’m trying to get at especially is whom she looks like. She resembles some one that I’ve seen before, but I can’t remember who it is.”
“What do you suppose made her act so queerly when I spoke of the stealing of your purse?” asked Bess.
“It wasn’t the robbery itself that startled her,” said Cora. “It was the name of the man, Higby. He was mentioned twice, and each time she looked frightened.”
“I wonder if she knows him,” murmured Belle.
“He said there were lots of girls who would be glad of his company,” laughed Bess. “Perhaps she is one of them.”
“There was no liking in that look of hers,” replied Cora emphatically. “It was positive alarm.”
“If a mere man may break into this discussion,” said Jack humbly, “you fair detectives haven’t yet told us why that pirate over there took the girl away from us.”
“That’s easy,” interposed Walter. “He was jealous. It was my fatal gift of beauty that worried him. The girls all fall for it – I mean, are attracted by it.”
“Girls,” asked Cora exasperatedly, “why are those long legs of Walter’s like organ grinders?”
“Why?” asked Belle.
“Give it up,” said Bess.
“Because,” explained Cora, “they always carry a monkey about with them.”
Walter staggered back.
“Stung!” he moaned. “Penetrated, I mean.”
“Well, don’t suffer too much, poor boy,” said Cora soothingly. “If it’s any comfort to you to know it, your two accomplices in crime are just as bad. Women are the only sensible human beings anyway.”
“Are they human?” asked Walter. “I’ve always thought of them as angels.”
“Stop trying to square yourself,” said Paul.
“Don’t knuckle down to them,” Jack adjured him.
“I must,” replied Walter, “or they won’t let me ride with them any more.”
“We’re not going to, anyway; that is, for the rest of this afternoon,” said Cora. “I want to have the girls in the car with me where we can talk over this thing without being interrupted.”
“Shut out from Eden,” groaned Walter bitterly. “You wash your hands of me. You cast me into outer darkness. Just when the better part of my nature was getting uppermost, you put me back into low company. I wouldn’t have believed it of you, girls.”
“Back to the kennel, you hound!” exclaimed Paul, seizing him by the collar. “You might have known that the girls would throw you down. They always do, sooner or later.”
“Well, now that Lucifer as lightning has fallen from heaven,” remarked Jack, “what do you say to hustling along? The afternoon waneth and my appetite waxeth. Dinner at Camp Kill Kare sounds awfully good to me.”
“I suppose we’ll have to,” assented Cora reluctantly; “but I would like to have another glimpse of that gypsy girl first.”
“Nothing doing,” said Jack. “We’re only visitors here anyway, and we haven’t any right to intrude on their private affairs when they show us so clearly they don’t want us to. Ten to one it’s only a mare’s nest anyway that you’re stirring up, sis, about the girl. Probably she’s an honest to goodness gypsy, just like the rest of them.”
“That’s what my common sense tells me,” agreed Cora, “but something outside of common sense tells me that she isn’t.”
“That’s the way I feel about it too,” echoed Bess.
“I too,” agreed Belle. “She may have been stolen when she was a child. That happens often enough.”
“Not so often as it used to,” said Paul. “The telegraph and the telephone make it too risky.”
“Well, how about it?” said Jack. “Are you three Graces coming along, or do we three scapegraces have to wend our way to Camp Kill Kare alone?”
“There she is now!” exclaimed Bess, as she caught sight of the gypsy girl looking at them from the door of the van.
But a wrinkled crone who was sitting on the top step of the van reached out a skinny arm and angrily pushed the girl inside and out of sight.
“They’ve evidently made up their minds that we’re showing too much interest in her, and for some reason they don’t like it,” sighed Cora. “Well, come along, girls. We’ll have to go. But that gypsy girl has a history and a secret, and I’d give a good deal to find out just what they are.”
CHAPTER VII
THE MOUNTAIN CAMP
The Motor Girls, followed by the boys, made their way briskly back to the cars and climbed in, Walter resuming his place with the other boys and Belle going back to Cora and Bess.
For some time previous to running across the gypsy camp they had been rising higher and higher into