Chica nodded with a quick elfish grin of intense pleasure and appreciation. "I was listening," she said, "I heard all. And I saw—would that I could see it again. Oh, if only the like would happen to me!"
"Tell the noble Don José who you are, my pretty Chica," said Pépe, soothingly.
But the child stamped her sandalled foot. It was still white at the instep, and the sergeant could see by the blue veins that she had not gone long barefoot. The marks of a child either stolen for ransom or run away from home owing to some wild strain in the blood were too obvious to be mistaken. Her liberty of movement among the gipsies made the latter supposition the more probable.
"I am not pretty Chica, and I am not little," she cried angrily. "I would have you remember, Pépe, that I made this plan, which the folk of Egypt are to execute to-night. But since this is the great brigand Don José of Ronda, who was executed at Salamanca, I will tell him all about it."
She looked round at the dark faces with which they were surrounded.
"There are new folk among these," she said, "men I do not know. Bid them go away. Else I will not speak of myself, and I have much to say to Don José!"
Pépe of the Eleven Wounds looked about him, and shook his head. Gipsydom is a commonwealth when it comes to a venture like this, and save in the presence of some undoubted leader, all Egypt has an equal right to hear and to speak. Pépe's authority was not sufficient for this thing. But that of the Sergeant was.
He lifted his Montera cap and said, "I would converse a while with this maid on the affairs of Egypt. 'Tis doubtless no more than you know already, and then, having heard her story my advice is at your service. But she will not speak with so many ears about. It is a woman's whim, and such the wisest of us must sometimes humour."
The gipsies smiled at the gay wave of his hand with which Cardono uttered this truism and quickly betook themselves out of earshot in groups of ten and a dozen. Cards were produced, and in a few minutes half a score of games were in progress at different points of the quarry-like cauldron which formed the outlaws' rendezvous.
At once the humour of the child changed.