“She is bad!” Gregor announced in English.  It seemed to be all the English he knew.

“Are you her father?” Monty asked, and Gregor answered in very slipshod German: 

“She is the daughter of the devil.  She shall be soundly thrashed!  The chalana!* And he a Gorgio!"**

----------------
* Chalana—­She jockey (a compliment).
** Gorgio—­Gentile (an insult).
----------------

Suddenly Fred began to shout for help then, and we rode back, the gipsies following and Rustum Khan remaining on guard between them and their camp with his upbrushed black beard bristling defiance of Asia Minor.  Our Turkish muleteers had decided to make a final bolt for it, and were using their whips on the Zeitoonli, who clung gamely to the reins.  As soon as we got near enough to lend a hand the Turks resigned themselves with a kind of opportune fatalism.  The Zeitoonli promptly turned the tables on them by laying hold of a leg of each and tipping them off into the mud.  Ibrahim showed his teeth, and reached for a hidden weapon as he lay, but seemed to think better of it.  It looked very much as if those four Zeitoonli knew in advance exactly what the interruption in our journey meant.

Will was out of the running entirely, or else the rest of us were, depending on which way one regarded it.  He had eyes for nobody and nothing but the girl, nor she for any one but him, and nobody could rightfully blame either of them.  Yankee though he is, Will sat his mule in the western cowboy style, and he was wearing a cowboy hat that set his youth off to perfection.  She looked fit to flirt with the lord of the underworld, answering his questions in a way that would have made any fellow eager to ask more.  Strangely enough, Gregor Jhaere, presumably father of the girl appeared to have lost his anger at her doings and turned his back.

Fred, smiling mischief, started toward them to horn in, as Will would have described it, but at that moment about a dozen of the gipsy women came padding uproad, fostered watchfully by Rustum Khan, who seemed convinced that murder was intended somehow, somewhere.  They brought along horses with them—­very good horses—­and Fred prefers a horse trade to triangular flirtation on any day of any week.

The gipsies promptly fell to and off-saddled our loads under Gregor Jhaere’s eye, transferring them to the meaner-looking among the beasts the women had brought, taking great care to drop nothing in the mud.  And at a word from Gregor two of the oldest hags came to lift us from our saddles one by one, and hold us suspended in mid-air while the saddles were transferred to better mounts.  But there is an indignity in being held out of the mud by women that goes fiercely against the white man’s grain, and I kicked until they set me back in the saddle.

Monty solved the problem by riding to higher, clean ground near the roadside, where we could stand on firm grass.