“Here, keep behind me.” Margot’s eyes were dancing. “Oh, isn’t it jolly to be away from rules for a bit?—though school is topping, of course. Still, keep down; don’t raise your head, and we’ll slither through the heather. There don’t seem to be any gipsies about; only the two horses, and they’re awfully tired-out looking ones. If you want to warn me, click with your tongue! That sound hardly carries at all; and it’s what the natives used to do.”
“Clic-c-ck!” came suddenly from behind her, after about ten minutes’ stealthy wriggling.
It was quite certain, too, what the “click” was intended to convey. Margot had been just about to sound the warning herself. Out through the tent flap had emerged two gipsy men.
“I say, do they know we’re here!” whispered the excited Tenderfoot to her guide.
“I don’t think so. Better keep to ‘clicking’ though. The horses will see us first; you may be sure of that.”
Margot was right. One of the weary-looking animals stopped grazing and looked across, as the sudden snap of a twig proclaimed to him that some kind of life was stirring close at hand. “Here,” whispered Margot, “let’s roll into this clump of scrub. We can’t turn and slither back till the men have gone; and we may as well have a good look at the horses.”
The points of the horses, however, did not seem exactly worth the stealthy journey. They were a couple of rather dispirited creatures, evidently picked up cheap at the last fair. Ill-kempt and shaggy of mane and tail; tethered up, too, just across the next ridge, where they cropped the moorland grass.
“I say, I hope the men won’t notice us,” remarked Stella, when they were safely hidden in their bushes. “They’d never understand a tracking practice; they’d think we were spying on them, and they might be furious.”
The gipsies, however, were evidently in no way aware that they had been secretly tracked, à la Australian aborigine, over their own bit of common land! The pair of them, still standing outside the tent flap which they had carefully pulled to after them, turned interested eyes on the horses.
“The far un hed ought to bring in a matter of ten quid at Rowsley Fair,” remarked one.