ath beside
him." He gazed at the dead man with the affection of a clansman for his
chief.

Fleda came up close to him. "Rhodo! Rhodo!" she said gently and sadly.
"Think of him and all he was, and not of me. Suppose I had died in
England--think of it in that way. Let me be dead to you and to all
Romanys, and then you will think no evil."

The old man drew himself up. "Let no more be said," he replied. "Let it
end here. The Ry of Rys is dead. His body and all things that are
his belong now to his people. Say farewell to him," he added, with
authority.

"You will take him away?" Fleda asked.

Rhodo inclined his head. "When the doctors have testified, we will take
him with us. Say your farewells," he added, with gesture of command.

A cry of protest rose from Fleda's soul, and yet she knew it was what
the Ry would have wished, that he should be buried by his own people
where they would.

Slowly she drew near to the dead man, and leaned over and kissed his
shaggy head. She did not seek to look into the sightless eyes; the
illusion of sleep was so great that she wished to keep this picture of
him while she lived; but she touched the cold hand which held the hat
upon the knee and the other that lay upon the chair-arm. Then, with a
mist before her eyes, she passed from the room.

CHAPTER XXVII. THE WORLD FOR SALE

As though by magic, like the pictures of a dream, out of the horizon,
in caravans, by train, on horseback, the Romany people gathered to the
obsequies of their chief and king. For months, hundreds of them had not
been very far away. Unobtrusive, silent, they had waited, watched, till
the Ry of Rys should come back home again. Home to them was the open
road where Romanys trailed or camped the world over.

A clot of blood in the heart had been the verdict of the doctors; and
Lebanon and Manitou had watched the Ry of Rys carried by his own people
to the open prairie near to Tekewani's reservation. There, in the
hours between the midnight and the dawn, all Gabriel Druse's personal
belongings--the clothes, the chair in which he sat, the table at which
he ate, the bed in which he slept, were brought forth and made into a
pyre, as was the Romany way. Nothing personal of his chattels remained
behind. The walking-stick which lay beside him in the moment of his
death was the last thing placed upon the pyre. Then came the match, and
the flames made ashes of all those things which once he called his own.
Standin