e knaw."

He was still humming this weird tune when they emerged into the open
fields, and there the traveler experienced a surprise.

A little rivulet lay across their path, and up from the margin of it
where she had been gathering water cresses there sprang a young girl,
who cast a startled glance at him, then bounded swiftly toward the tent
and vanished through the opening.

Now it happened that this keen admirer of horses was equally susceptible
to the charms of female beauty, and the loveliness of this young girl
made his blood tingle. In her hand she carried a bunch of cresses still
dripping with the water of the brook. A black bodice was drawn close to
a figure which was just unfolding into womanhood. The color of this
garment formed a striking contrast to a scarlet skirt which fell only a
little below her knees. On her feet were low-cut shoes, fastened with
rude silver buckles. A red kerchief had become untied and let loose a
wave of black hair, which fell over her half bare shoulders. Her face
was oval, her complexion olive, her eyes large, eager and lustrous.

All this the man who admired women even more than he admired horses, saw
in the single instant before the girl dashed toward the tent and
disappeared. So swift an apparition would have bewildered rather than
illumined the mind of an ordinary man. But the quack was not an ordinary
man. He was endowed with a certain rude power of divination which
enabled him to see in a single instant, by swift intuition, more than
the average man discovers by an hour of reasoning. By this natural
clairvoyance he saw at a glance that this face of exquisite delicacy
could no more have been coined in a gypsy camp than a fine cameo could
be cut in an Indian wigwam. He knew that all gypsies were thieves, and
that these were Spanish gypsies. What was more natural than that he
should conclude with inevitable logic that this child had been stolen
from people of good if not of noble blood!

He who had coveted the horse with desire, hungered for the maiden with
passion; and with him, to feel an appetite, was to rush toward its
gratification, as fire rushes upon tow.

"Baltasar!" he said.

The gypsy turned.

"You are a girl-thief as well as a horse-thief."

If the gypsy had felt astonished before, he was now terrified in the
presence of a man who seemed to read his inmost thoughts; and for the
first time in his life acknowledged to himself that he had met his
master in cu