As they had approached the man had thrown some dry sticks on top of the shavings which he had lighted, and he now straightened and stood up regarding them whimsically.
He had seen the wagon through the trees long before they had seen him and had wondered what gypsies were doing here so far from the ways of their trade. Now he saw that they were not of any of the kinds of gypsies that he had ever known. They looked, as Mr. Gamblin had remarked, exactly like a pair of runaway children.
"I couldn't but see the two of you at the lake," he said in a rich, soft, South of Ireland brogue that made Jimmie gasp—he would as soon have expected to be stopped here among the trees by a Broadway traffic policeman as to have heard a voice like that here—"and I saw the faces of you when you saw me. You were two blessed childer runnin' to the end of your rainbow, an' when you got there, when you got there, here was an ould dodherin Dimmick sittin' with his hand already in the pot o' gold."
"But we really hadn't any right to expect to find such a beautiful place untaken," said Augusta easily.
The man nudged the sticks of the fire gently with his foot and looked down at Augusta out of a pair of great, soft blue eyes. He was an enormous man of powerfully rounded build, as tall as Wardwell but so broad and solid of stature that, at a little distance he would have seemed just a well-knit man of medium height.
Wardwell had nothing to say. That wonderful brogue had silenced him completely. And the man's face was one which would have drawn attention in any crowd or setting.
It was a large, clean, unlined face as clear and chubby as the face of a rugged healthy boy. Yet it had in it the same quiet power which the man's giant limbs and torso concealed under their perfect proportions.
Wardwell, on the instant, remembered that he had seen three faces strikingly like this. One was the face of a United States senator. Another belonged to a powerful Anglican bishop. The third was the face of a noted downtown New York politician who was said now to be confined in a madhouse. A fantastic suspicion connected with that third face flashed across Jimmie's brain and probably showed for an instant in his eyes. But he almost laughed in the big man's face at the absurdity of the idea.
This man was different. His loose gray shirt and broad overalls revealed a body that fairly pulsed with the clean health of years of out of doors, while a gentle, fine light of sadness and of wholesome humor played almost imperceptibly in the soft blue eyes. The gray hair, cut down close and crisp, told of probably sixty years lightly and soundly lived.
"I'll be moving along early in the morning," he was saying to Augusta, though he was watching Wardwell with a gleam in his eyes. He had seen the flash of a question on Jimmie's face.