The caravan shivered to a rattling stop. The dark, fat couple on the seat began jabbering at each other in some outlandish tongue.
“Never mind that!” came Diker’s command. “Come down here in the road! Now, I just want you to answer a few questions—— Quiet! How do you expect me to talk when you’re gabblin’ like a bunch of turkeys?”
“What ees it you do, Meester?”
“Come down, I say! That’s right—now bring the lady.” Diker turned to his chief. “I’ll bring ’em over to you, Warden, so you can ask ’em anything you like. Over here, please! Gypsies, aren’t you?”
Jerry, from his seat in the car, could look down upon the heads of the two dark little people who were now lost in the cross-fire of questions put to them by Diker and the warden.
“Now, you stopped up by Lake Wallis a few hours ago. We’re looking for a man, a convict, who has escaped and who was last seen at the place you stopped. Know anything about him?”
The little man almost had tears in his large rolling black eyes. “Ah, Meester, I have hear of that wicked man! No, thanks to the saints I have seen no wicked man—eh, Maria?”
His gestures were comical, but Jerry Utway was not watching. Did his eyes deceive him, or was there a ripple of movement behind the canvas top of the other car? Was it really true that Jake and the man Burk were——
“No,” the little stranger went on; “there was no wicked man. But—wait a meenit—there was a very good man, a good man who help me poosh—and a very good leetle boy——”
Jerry, who had not taken his eyes from the opening in the canvas front of the caravan, bit his lip to keep from shouting. For an instant, he had seen a pale face peeping out there, and it was Jake’s face! They were in that car, hiding under the canvas top! In another second the fat, voluble little man would give them away, and then it would be all over!