“Oh, Lolla, please put that away!” she exclaimed.  “There’s no one here to be afraid of.”  Lolla laughed.

“No, but I have it if I need it,” she said meaningly.

“What are we going to do now, Lolla?  We can’t leave Dolly up there much longer.  They’ve got her tied up, and gagged, so that she can’t call out, and she’s terribly uncomfortable, though I don’t think she’s suffering much.”

“We will get her soon,” said Lolla, confidently.

“You stay near where she is, so that they can’t get her away,” said Bessie, “and I’ll go and get help.  Then we shan’t have any trouble.”

But Lolla frowned at the suggestion.

“You would get those guides, and they would catch my man and put him in prison, oh, for years, perhaps!  No, no; I will get her away, with you to help me.  Leave that to me.  Peter is stupid.  Come with me now; I know what we must do.”

“Where are you going?  This isn’t the way back to where Dolly is,” protested Bessie, as Lolla pressed on in the direction from which Bessie had come.  “We can never get up those rocks, Lolla; it was hard enough to come down.”

“We are not going there, not yet,” said Lolla.  “I must go to the camp and find out what John is doing.  If he comes back to watch her himself it will be harder.  But if he has to stay, and Peter looks after her, then we shall have no trouble.  You shall see; only trust me.  I managed so that you saw her, didn’t I?  Doesn’t that show you that I can do what I say?”

“I suppose so,” sighed Bessie.  “I should think you wouldn’t care if that man does go to prison, though, Lolla.  He isn’t nice to you, and you say he’ll beat you when you’re married.  American men don’t beat their wives.  If they did they would be sent to prison.  I should think you’d give him up—­”

Lolla’s dark eyes flamed for a moment, but then she smiled, as if she had remembered that Bessie, not being a gypsy, could not be expected to understand the gypsy ways.

“He is a good man,” she said.  “He will always see that I have enough to eat, and pretty things to wear.  And if he beats me, it will be because I have been wicked, and deserve to be beaten.  When I am his wife he will be like my father; if I am bad he will punish me.  Is it not so among your people?”

Bessie struggled with a laugh at the thought of the only married couple she had ever known at all well:  Paw and Maw Hoover.  The idea that Paw Hoover, the mildest and most inoffensive of men, might ever beat his wife would have made anyone who knew that couple laugh.

Instead of turning when they reached the trail which Bessie had followed after her descent from the rocks, Lolla led the way straight on.

“Are you sure you know where you are going, Lolla!” asked Bessie.

Lolla smiled at her scornfully.

“Yes, but it is not the way you would go,” she said.  “The trail to the camp will be full of people.  They will be out all over the camp particularly.  We must come to it from another direction.  That is why we are going this way.”