rain. As old Berry spoke, however, his course opened out.

"I heard. I am a stranger. My fiddle is not here. My fingers itch for
the cat-gut. Eh?"

The look in old Berry's face softened a little. His instinct had been
against his visitor, and he had been prepared to send him to another
shop-besides, not every day could he talk to the greatest man in the
West.

"If you can play, there it is," he said after a slight pause, and handed
the fiddle over.

It was true that Jethro Fawe loved the fiddle. He had played it in
many lands. Twice, in order to get inside the palace of a monarch for
a purpose--once in Berlin and once in London--he had played the second
violin in a Tzigany orchestra. He turned the fiddle slowly round,
looking at it with mechanical intentness. Through the passion of emotion
the sure sense of the musician was burning. His fingers smoothed the
oval brown breast of the instrument with affection. His eyes found joy
in the colour of the wood, which had all the graded, merging tints of
Autumn leaves.

"It is old--and strange," he said, his eyes going from Berry to Ingolby
and back again with a veiled look, as though he had drawn down blinds
before his inmost thoughts. "It was not made by a professional."

"It was made in the cotton-field by a slave," observed old Berry
sharply, yet with a content which overrode antipathy to his visitor.

Jethro put the fiddle to his chin, and drew the bow twice or thrice
sweepingly across the strings. Such a sound had never come from Berry's
violin before. It was the touch of a born musician who certainly had
skill, but who had infinitely more of musical passion.

"Made by a slave in the cotton-fields!" Jethro said with a veiled look,
and as though he was thinking of something else: "'Dordi', I'd like to
meet a slave like that!"

At the Romany exclamation Ingolby swept the man with a searching look.
He had heard the Romany wife of Ruliff Zaphe use the word many years ago
when he and Charley Long visited the big white house on the hill. Was
the man a Romany, and, if so, what was he doing here? Had it anything to
do with Gabriel Druse and his daughter? But no--what was there strange
in the man being a Romany and playing the fiddle? Here and there in the
West during the last two years, he had seen what he took to be Romany
faces. He looked to see the effect of the stranger's remark on old
Berry.

"I was a slave, and I was like that. My father made that fiddle in the