“You more’n half believe it yourself, Frank Allen, and you don’t dare deny it!” he exclaimed, heatedly.
“Tell me about that, will you?” Bones could be heard saying to himself, as he ran along just behind them, and evidently “listening for all he was worth,” as Lanky remarked later on; for despite his skepticism Bones was himself beginning to feel a little touch of the fever that was working on Lanky.
“Only this far,” Frank went on to say, in response to the accusation of his chum; “there might be something in what you’ve got on your brain. But the chances are ten to one, Lanky, that in the end it’ll prove to be only a little gypsy girl who has been bad and spanked by her ma.”
“Oh, now it’s only ten to one; is it?” demanded the other, quickly; “and a little while back the odds were a hundred to one. Shows that you’re falling to my idea pretty rapid, Frank. Now, I’ve been in gypsy camps heaps of times and so have both of you. Will you promise to give me a straight answer, if I ask you a question?”
“You know I will, Lanky,” said Frank.
“If it’s nothing personal, I’ll promise, too,” came from the cautious Bones, who may have had a few secrets of his own to which he did not wish to confess.
“Did you ever hear a gypsy child cry, either one of you?” demanded Lanky, with a triumphant look on his thin face, as though he felt that this question was what he would call a “clincher.”
Frank paused a brief time as if for reflection.
“I never did!” he finally replied, with emphasis.
“How about you, Bones?” pursued Lanky.