Vengeance is their idol.  If any community has injured or affronted them, they never cease endeavouring to retaliate, and will wipe it out in fire and blood generations afterwards.  There are towns which have thus been suddenly harried when the citizens had forgotten that any cause of enmity existed.  Vengeance is their religion and their social law, which guides all their actions among themselves.  It is for this reason that they are continually at war, duke with duke, and king with king.  A deadly feud, too, has set Bushman and gipsy at each other’s throat, far beyond the memory of man.  The Romany looks on the Bushman as a dog, and slaughters him as such.  In turn, the despised human dog slinks in the darkness of the night into the Romany’s tent, and stabs his daughter or his wife, for such is the meanness and cowardice of the Bushman that he would always rather kill a woman than a man.

There is also a third class of men who are not true gipsies, but have something of their character, though the gipsies will not allow that they were originally half-breeds.  Their habits are much the same, except that they are foot men and rarely use horses, and are therefore called the foot gipsies.  The gipsy horse is really a pony.  Once only have the Romany combined to attack the house people, driven, like the Bushmen, by an exceedingly severe winter, against which they had no provision.

But, then, instead of massing their forces and throwing their irresistible numbers upon one city or territory, all they would agree to do was that, upon a certain day, each tribe should invade the land nearest to it.  The result was that they were, though with trouble, repulsed.  Until lately, no leader ventured to follow the gipsies to their strongholds, for they were reputed invincible behind their stockades.  By infesting the woods and lying in ambush they rendered communication between city and city difficult and dangerous, except to bodies of armed men, and every waggon had to be defended by troops.

The gipsies, as they roam, make little secret of their presence (unless, of course, intent upon mischief), but light their fires by day and night fearlessly.  The Bushmen never light a fire by day, lest the ascending smoke, which cannot be concealed, should betray their whereabouts.  Their fires are lit at night in hollows or places well surrounded with thickets, and, that the flame may not be seen, they will build screens of fir boughs or fern.  When they have obtained a good supply of hot wood coals, no more sticks are thrown on, but these are covered with turf, and thus kept in long enough for their purposes.  Much of their meat they devour raw, and thus do not need a fire so frequently as others.

CHAPTER IV

THE INVADERS