“Oh! Frank, is that so?” burst from the delighted Lanky, his eyes sparkling once more with renewed interest. “You saw all that, did you, when we were talking with the gypsy men? Aren’t you the swift bunch, though, to get on to everything, while I stand around with my mouth open, but my eyes stuck fast? Then she sent the little girl away, and asked us to take a look around in her wagon just to pull the wool over my eyes? And, Frank, she’d ’a’ done it for me, right up to the notch, only for you being so smart!”
CHAPTER XVIII
FINDING OUT
Lanky was once more himself. The look of gloom had vanished from his thin face, and he turned an eager glance on his comrade.
“I’ve been thinking,” Frank went on, slowly, as he sometimes did when he was trying to grasp an idea, “that we ought to do something to settle this business about whether there really is a little child in the charge of the old queen, or not.”
“Hear! hear!” burst out the other, pretending to clap his hands.
“If it turns out that there isn’t any such thing as the child you believed tried to attract your attention, then the sooner we give up all this foolishness, why, the better; you understand, Lanky?”
“But if there is such a little girlie, Frank?”
“We’ll stay in the game, make sure of that,” replied the other, in a determined tone that told Lanky what he might expect.
“Oh! I agree with you all right, about that, Frank,” he observed; “but the question is, how under the sun can we do it? That sly old queen knows how to slip the child away every time we happen to be seen coming around the camp.”
“Well, we must make out not to be seen, then, next time,” was the matter-of-fact way Frank put it.