[CHAPTER IX—THE SPOONDRIFT BUNGALOW]
“I don’t think these are very nice looking men, do you, Tess?” Dot seriously asked her sister as the party halted before the Gypsy camp.
“Why, Dot!” gasped Tess. “That man there is the very fellow who tried to steal Ruth’s chickens!”
“Oh—o-o!”
“Yes, he is,” whispered the amazed Tess. “He’s the young man Tom Jonah chased up on to the henhouse roof.”
“Well,” said the philosophical Dot, “he can’t steal our chickens here.”
“Just the same I wish Tom Jonah was here with us. I—I’d feel better about meeting him,” confessed Tess.
The other girls did not hear this conversation between the two youngest Kenways. Ruth and Agnes, however, were really troubled by the meeting with the Gypsies; the former was, in addition, suspicious of the woman who had been on the train with them.
This strange woman did not come out of the tent. Indeed, almost at once she disappeared, dropping the curtain. She did not wish to be observed by the girls from Milton.
“Oh, come on!” cried the reckless Pearl. “They’ll only ask us a dime each. ‘Cross their palms with silver,’ you know. And they do tell the queerest things sometimes.”