“You must!” she said again more quietly.  “That is the only way to save Zeitoon.  God is angry.”

“What do you know about God?” I asked unguardedly, knowing well that whatever their open pretenses, gipsies despise all religion except diabolism.  They study creeds for the sake of plunder, just as hunters study the habits of the wild.

“Maybe nothing—­maybe much!  Peter Measel, he say—­”

She paused, as if in doubt whether she was using the right argument.  And in that moment I recalled what Rustum Khan had once said about her being no true gipsy.

“Go on,” I urged her.  “Peter Measel is an expert.  He’s a high priest.  He knows it all.”

“Peter Measel is saying, God is ver’ angry with Zeitoon and is sending to destroy such bloody people what plan fighting and rebellion.”

“I’ll think it over,” I said, moving to get up.  But independent thinking was the last thing that Maga intended to permit me.

“No, no!  No, no, no!  You must dee-cide now—­at once!  There is no time.  Now—­now I give you five—­six mens—­now they seize that woman Gloria—­now you carry ’er away into the mountains—­now you make ‘er yours—­your own, you understan’, so as she is ashamed to deny it afterward—­yes?—­you see?”

“Where are the men?” I demanded.

“I fetch them quick!”

I could see the hilt of her knife, and the bulge of her repeating pistol, but I could also feel the weight of my own loaded Colt against my hip.  I did not doubt I could escape before her men could arrive on the scene, but that would have been to leave some secret only part uncovered.  There was obviously more behind this scheme than met the ear.  It is my experience that if we throw fear to the winds, and are willing to wait in tight places for the necessary inspiration, then we get it.

“Very well,” I said.  “I agree.  Bring your men.”

“You wait.  I get ’em.”

I nodded, and she said something in the gipsy language to the old hag, who went out through the door in a hurry.  Alone with Maga I felt less than half as safe as I had been.  She proceeded to make use of every moment in the manner they say makes millionaires.

“Gloria, she is ver’ nice girl!” She made a wonderful gesture of both hands that limned in empty air the curves of her detested rival.  “You will love her.  By-and-by she love you—­also ver’ much.”

The thought flashed through my head again that I ought to escape whole while I had the chance; but the answer to that was the certainty that she would thence-forward be on guard against me without having given me any real information.  I was perfectly convinced there was a deep plot underlying the foolishness she had proposed.  The fact that she considered me so venial and so gullible was no proof that the hidden purpose was not dangerous.  The mystery was how to seem to be fooled by her and yet get in touch with my friends.  Then suddenly I recalled that she and the hag had been trying to use the gipsy’s black art.  Unless they can trick their victim into a mental condition in which innate superstition becomes uppermost, players of that dark game are helpless.