With the dawn Weston swung his truck sharply to the right, drove on for a quarter of a mile and then brought it to a sputtering halt.
“Hey, Merry!” he shouted back. “We’re here. And over there is your friend. See! She is dancing the sun up. She is dancing around a gypsy camp fire.”
And there, sure enough, radiant as the morn, was the little French girl, dancing her heart away while a broad circle of gypsy folks admired and applauded.
“Now, what,” Merry rubbed her eyes as she tumbled from the truck, “what do you think of that?”
CHAPTER XXIV
THE FALLING SAND
“These people surely did kidnap me. But, oh, for a very good reason!” Petite Jeanne placed her palms against one another and held them up as a child does in a good-night prayer.
Almost on the instant of their arrival, the little French girl’s keen eyes had recognized the men of Merry’s “Golden Circle” and had come dancing out to meet them.
When Merry tumbled out at the back of the van, Jeanne had seized her by the hand and, without a word of explanation, dragged her to a place beside the gypsy camp fire. After a moment in which to regain her breath and overcome her astonishment at the arrival of these friends, she had seized a huge pot of English tea and a plate of cakes and then had dragged Merry away to the shadows of a huge black pine tree, leaving the three men to have breakfast with the gypsies.
“And to think!” she cried, “that you should have come all this way to find me, you and your ‘Golden Circle!’”
“We—we thought you must be in great distress,” Merry murmured.