lked boldly through the outer ring of spectators to
the camp's centre and genially hailed the aged woman, who, on first
looking up from her cookery, held out a withered palm for the silver
that should buy him secrets of his future.

But Dave Cowan merely preened his beautiful yellow moustache at her and
said, "How's business, Mother?" Whereupon she saw that Dave was not a
villager to be wheedled by her patter. She recognized him, indeed, as
belonging like herself to the freemasonry of them that know men and
cities, and she spoke to him as one human to another.

"Business been pretty rotten here," she said as she stirred the kettle's
contents. "Oh, we made two-three pretty good horse trades--nothing much.
We go on to a bigger town to-morrow."

A male gypsy in corduroy trousers and scarlet sash and calico shirt open
on his brown throat came to the fire now, and the Wilbur twin admiringly
noted that his father greeted this rare being, too, as an equal. The
gypsy held beneath an arm a trim young gamecock feathered in rich browns
and reds, with a hint of black, and armed with needle-pointed spurs. He
stroked the neck of the bird and sat on his haunches with Dave before
the fire to discuss affairs of the road; for he, too, divined at a
glance that Dave was here but a gypsy transient, even though he spoke a
different lingo.

The Wilbur twin sat also on his haunches before the fire, and thrilled
with pride as his father spoke easily of distant strange cities that the
gypsies also knew; cities of the North where summer found them, and
cities of the South to which they fared in winter. He had always been
proud of his father, but never so proud as now, when he sat there
talking to real gypsies as if they were no greater than any one. He was
quite ashamed when the gypsies' dog, a gaunt, hungry-looking beast,
narrowly escaped being eaten up by his own dog. But Frank, at the sheer
verge of a deplorable offense, implicitly obeyed his master's command
and forbore to destroy the gypsy mongrel. Again he flopped to his back
at the interested approach of the other dog, held four limp paws aloft,
and simpered at the stranger.

Other gypsies, male and female, came to the group about the fire, and
lively chatter ensued, a continuous flashing of white teeth and shaking
of golden ear hoops and rattling of silver bracelets. The Wilbur twin
fondly noted that his father knew every city the gypsies knew, and even
told them the advantages of so