Rex; but
Johnny only chuckled and cracked his whip. Day by day the green and
white caravan rumbled serenely on, camping by night in field and forest.

A country world of peace and sunshine--of droning bees and the nameless
fragrance of summer fields it was! And the struggling nomads of the
dusty road! Diane felt a kindred thrill of interest in each one of
them. Now a Syrian peddler woman, squat and swarthy, bending heavily
beneath her pack amid a flurry of dust from the sun-baked roads her
feet had wearily padded for days; now a sleepy negro on a load of hay,
an organ grinder with a chattering monkey or a clumsy bear, another
sleepy negro with another load of hay, and a picturesque minstrel with
an elaborate musical contrivance drawn by a horse. Now a capering
Italian with a bagpipe, who danced grotesquely to his own piping, and
piped the pennies out of rural pockets as if they had been so many
copper rats from Hamelin!

Peddlers and tramps and agents, country drummers and country circuses,
medicine men who shouted the versatile merits of corn salve by the
light of flaring torches, eccentric orators of eccentric theology,
tent-shows of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," with real bloodhounds and unreal
painted ice, gypsies who were always expected to steal some one's
children and never did, peddlers with creaking, clinking wagons,
hucksters and motorcyclists, motorists and dusty hikers--one by one in
the days to come Diane was to meet them all and learn that the nomads
of the summer road were a happy-go-lucky guild of peculiar and
cooeperative good humor.

But the girl herself was a truer nomad than many to whom with warm
friendliness she nodded and spoke.

Late one afternoon Diane espied a woodland brook. Shot with gold and
shadow, it laughed along, under a waving canopy of green, freckled with
cool, clean pebbles and hiding roguishly now and then beneath a
trailing branch. A brook was a luxury. It was mirror and spring and
lullaby in one.

By six the tents of the nomad were pitched by the forest brook and the
nomad herself was smoothing back her ruffled hair over a crystalline
mirror.

A drowsy negro on a load of hay drove by on the road beyond.

Diane studied him with critical interest.

"Johnny," she said, "just why are there so many drowsy negroes about
driving loads of hay? Or is that the same one? And if it is, where
under Heaven has he been driving that hay for the last three days?"

Johnny didn't know.