The boy said nothing but sat poking at the sand with a stick. It looked very mysterious to him. “You don’t know what that Spico, or whatever it is you call him; you don’t know what crime he had committed that he left your native country so suddenly?”
The girl shook her head. “And we didn’t stop in the East where we landed, but we came right on and on and on till we reached California.”
The boy was thinking aloud. “It seems strange to me that the authorities where the boats stop would permit wandering bands of gypsies to land in this country without knowing what they come for, or why they are leaving their own native land.”
“What do you mean, authorities? What are they?” The girl was plainly perplexed.
“Why when a big vessel arrives at Castle Garden in New York, every passenger has been given a permit to land from Ellis Island where they first stop. Oh, there’s a lot of red tape before anyone can come ashore, and I should think a whole band of gypsies would have considerable difficulty passing the examiners, that is what I mean by authorities.”
Still the girl looked at him blankly as one who did not understand. “We landed in the night on a lonely marshy shore. Florida they called it. The sailing barge that brought us across the sea left before daybreak, and when the sun came up we were in our caravans riding across a flat lonely country. We saw very few people because we slept days and passed through the villages at night. The gorigo police sometimes followed us to see that we kept going until we were out of the town but nobody stopped us. Then, for weeks and weeks we were crossing the wide sandy desert. We camped a long time in the Rocky Mountains. I never did understand that, I mean why we seemed to be hiding. I thought maybe Anselo Spico had stolen something and we were waiting until it would be safe to go on, but I heard Vestor report one night, when he came back from town that there had been no mail from Rumania and so I supposed that we had been waiting there long enough for Anselo Spico to write someone in Rumania and that we were waiting for the reply. At last it came and the message in that letter angered him terribly. He seized a whip and began to lash poor little Tirol. I threw myself on the child and he began to beat me. It was his Queen Mother Mizella, who stopped him by saying. I never forgot the words though they meant nothing to me. ‘Bedone with that! You’re like to kill her as may line your purse yet.’ He snarled an answer, but he let us both alone after that or at least he never beat me again.”
Robert Widdemere was more than ever convinced that Nan had been stolen as a child and that the gypsies were hoping someday to receive a rich reward for her, but what he could not understand was why, if that were true, it had been so long in coming.
If she had own relations in Rumania, they surely would have been glad to pay the ransom money as soon as they found the whereabouts of the child.
But of his thoughts, he said nothing. After a few moments, he asked; “What did you do next, Lady Red Bird?”
“Our caravan left the mountains and we traveled slowly westward. Manna Lou was kinder to me than ever before, and she taught me to play on a banjo which she said had belonged to my father. She did not know much about it, but I was so glad, glad to have it.”