"I'm glad we didn't bring Snap," said Bert. "There'd have been a dog fight as sure as fate."
"Yes, I guess so," agreed his father.
By this time they had entered the gypsy camp, and some of the dark-faced men, with dangling gold rings in their ears, came walking slowly forward as if to ask the two visitors with the little boy what was wanted.
"We're after a big doll," said Mr. Bobbsey. "One was taken from a little girl in our town yesterday. Perhaps you gypsies took it by mistake; and, if so, we'd be glad to have it back."
"We haven't any doll," growled one big gypsy. "We have only what is our own."
"I'm not so sure about that," said Mr. Carr. "We'll have a look about the camp and see what we can find."
The gypsy growled and said something else, though what it was Bert could not hear. The gypsies did not seem pleased to have visitors, nor did the dogs who sniffed about the feet of Bert, his father and the policeman. One dog growled, while others barked, and then the gypsy man who had first spoken made them go away.
"You are wasting your time here," said this gypsy, who seemed to be the leader, or "king," as he is sometimes called. "We have nothing but what is our own. We have no little girl's doll."
"We'll have a look about," said Mr. Carr again.
But though the policeman and Mr. Bobbsey, to say nothing of Bert, who had very sharp eyes, looked all about the gypsy camp, there was no sign of the missing doll. If a gypsy man had taken it, of which Helen, at least, was very sure, he had either hidden it well or, possibly, had gone off by himself to some other camp in another part of the woods.