Maga (for so they all called her) flirted with Will outrageously, if that is flirting that proclaims conquest from the start, and sets flashing white teeth in defiance of all intruders.  Even the little children had hidden weapons, but Maga was better armed than any one, and she thrust the new mother-o-pearl-plated acquisition in the face of one of the men who dared drive his horse between hers and Will’s.  That not serving more than to amuse him, she slapped him three times back-handed across the face, and thrusting the pistol back into her bosom, drew a knife.  He seemed in no doubt of her willingness to use the steel, and backed his horse away, followed by language from her like forked lightning that disturbed him more than the threatening weapon.  Gipsies are great believers in the efficiency of a curse.

Nothing could be further from the mark than to say that Will tried to take advantage of Maga’s youth and savagery.  Fred and I had shared a dozen lively adventures with him without more than beginning yet to plumb the depths of his respect for Woman.  Only an American in all the world knows how to meet Young Woman eye to eye with totally unpatronizing frankness, and he was without guile in the matter.  But not so she.  We did not know whether or not she was Gregor Jhaere’s daughter; whether or not she was truly the gipsy that she hardly seemed.  But she was certainly daughter of the Near East that does not understand a state of peace between the sexes.  There was nothing lawful in her attitude, nor as much as the suspicion that Will might be merely chivalrous.

“America’s due for sex-enlightenment!” said I.

“Warn him if you like,” Fred laughed, “and then steer clear!  Our America is proud besides imprudent!”

Fred off-shouldered all responsibility and forestalled anxiety on any one’s account by playing tunes, stampeding the whole cavalcade more than once because the horses were unused to his clanging concertina, but producing such high spirits that it became a joke to have to dismount in the mud and replace the load on some mule who had expressed enjoyment of the tune by rolling in slime, or by trying to kick clouds out of the sky.

And strangely enough he brought about the very last thing he intended with his music—­stopped the flirtation’s immediate progress.  Maga seemed to take to Fred’s unchastened harmony with all the wildness that possessed her.  Some chord he struck, or likelier, some abandoned succession of them touched off her magazine of poetry.  And so she sang.

The only infinitely gorgeous songs I ever listened to were Maga’s.  Almighty God, who made them, only really knows what country the gipsies originally came from, but there is not a land that has not felt their feet, nor a sorrow they have not witnessed.  Away back in the womb of time there was planted in them a rare gift of seeing what the rest of us can only sometimes hear, and of hearing what only very