“Yes, sir,” said Wilbur.  “Couldn’t we go up to the gypsy camp now?”

Dave refilled the calabash pipe, lighted it, and held the match while it burned out.

“That fire came from the sun,” he said.  “We’re only burning matches ourselves—­burning with a little fire from the sun.  Pretty soon it flickers out.”

“It’s just over this next hill, and they got circus wagons and a fire where they cook their dinners, right outdoors, and fighting roosters, and tell your fortune.”

Dave rose.

“Of course I don’t say I know it all yet.  There’s a catch in it I haven’t figured out.  But I’m right as far as I’ve gone.  You can’t go wrong if you take the facts and stay by ’em and don’t read books that leave the facts to one side, like most books do.”

“Yes, sir,” said Wilbur, “and they sleep inside their wagons and I wish we had a wagon like that and drove round the country and lived in it.”

“All right,” said his father.  “Stir your stumps.”

They followed the path that led up over another little hill winding through clumps of hazel brush and a sparse growth of oak and beech.  From the summit of this they could see the gypsy camp below them, in an open glade by the roadside.  It was as the Wilbur twin had said:  there were gayly-painted wagons—­houses on wheels—­and a campfire and tethered horses and the lolling gypsies themselves.  About the outskirts loafed a dozen or so of the less socially eligible of Newbern.  Above a fire at the camp centre a kettle simmered on its pothook, being stirred at this moment by a brown and aged crone in frivolous-patterned calico, who wore gold hoops in her ears and bangles at her neck and bracelets of silver on her arms—­bejewelled, indeed, most unbecomingly for a person of her years.

The Wilbur twin would have lingered on the edge of the glade with other local visitors, a mere silent observer of this delightful life; he had not dreamed of being accepted as a social equal by such exalted beings.  But his father stalked 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.”