Flynn’s Weekly Detective Fiction. Vol. 25, No. 2, August 13, 1927

Knowing I’d have to be pretty cute, I made a bluff at stopping at the springs for a drink. While I guzzled a little water, I saw the gypsies watching me with all eyes. Seeming not to pay any attention to ’em at all, I started back to my car and jumped into the seat. Then I shoves my foot down on the starter — only I didn’t throw the switch in. Of course the motor wouldn’t go, and I jumped out and lifted up the hood, pretending to be all puzzled like.

Pretty soon I hears some one walking up to me, and I turns around.

There, giving me the glad smile, stood the prettiest gypsy girl what I ever seen.

She had the whitest teeth, the darkest eyes, and the blackest hair of any woman I ever took a squint at. And her complexion; say, it was real — just the color of creamed coffee and without a wart or a mole.

She was all dolled up in a white, blousey, cutaway waist over which she wore a kind of a black velvet vest. The vest didn’t come together in the front by at least six inches, and the bottom of it didn’t quite reach her wide red sash. The tails of the sash trailed down on one side below the end of her black skirt. But you mustn’t get it into your head that those tails were so terribly long, ’cause her skirt didn’t quite come to her knees.

“You stuck?” she asked, still smiling. “How far you got to go?”

“Stuck for keeps!” I growled, trying to look kind of worried like. “My farm is way up in the next valley. It’s nearly twenty miles from here. I’ll have to wait around until I can catch a ride to the nearest garage.”

I could see before she opened up her yap she’d fallen for my clever acting. She stood eying me, just like a kid eyes a plate of ice cream he expects to get.

“Too bad!” she heaved — she seemed to pull it out from way down near her sash. “Too bad machine broke! But never mind, Rita tell your fortune while you wait. Come over to tent!”

“Don’t know as I want my fortune told,” I stalled, to fool her all the more. “I’d never like to know just what’s going to happen — life would get too damn tame.”

“Then Rita show you how to make lots of money — how’s that?”

“Not so bad!” I grunted. “In that case I’ll go over to your tent.”

Rita’s smile would knock you cold.

I let her start and I followed.

Up the footpath we went, going past the bubbling springs and then between a bunch of big rocks higher than your head. The way that girl walked it didn’t seem more than two minutes before we was in the middle of the gypsy camp.

As I gaped around, just like a rube would, taking in all the gypsies about, I saw a tall, dark, skinny heathen, standing as straight and stiff as a poker with his arms folded over his chest. He was parked near the flap of the biggest tent. Rita must have caught my rubbering look, for she stopped short and grabbed my hand.

“My father — the chief!” she sort of whispered, her eyes shimmying up into my face.

“Fine man!” I said out loud, and then finished to myself. “To hit over the head with a blackjack.”

I took another squint as we started to move along. Back of the Old Boy, peeping through the flap of the tent, I spied another face. And he wasn’t no gypsy, either! His hair was brown like mine, and his eyes were gray — that cold kind of gray that seems to look clear through your skull.

I’d run across fellows like him before. They were always good-for-nothing trash, what didn’t have the guts to be a real crook. They’d pull off some little picayune job and then hide among a bunch of negroes, gypsies or Chinese, shivering for their lives.

“That’s the sheriff’s man, sure as you’re born!” I thought, quick taking my glimmers from the tent so they wouldn’t get suspicious. “But since I’ve got him fooled, I’ll give him plenty of rope.”

You see, I wanted to draw out of Rita all I could about that fellow before she found out I was a State cop. It was my game to get all the dope to be got before the sheriff breezed in. And besides, I told you it was Spring.

It was only another minute before we were in Rita’s tent. As the chief’s daughter, she had one all to herself. Hers was the farthest from the road and the smallest in the camp. I took care to flop down where I could watch the chief’s canvas through the opening. If that gray-eyed geaser made a move to get away, I’d nail him quick!

I just got fixed nice when Rita dropped down on the ground beside me, and taking Bud’s straw hat off of my head, she began running her fingers through my hair.

“If you got any money with you, Rita show you how to make it double,” she mooned in my ear, at the same time catching ahold of one of my paws with her other hand. “Such a handsome man I never seen!”

Of course I had to kid her along. When we made the pinch, I’d get the money back. I could afford to be real generous for a few minutes. And somehow I kind of liked the feel of her hands. It was Spring.

“I haven’t got so much — only about forty bucks,” I said, pulling out my roll — the ten spot wrapped around the thirty ones. “But even that would be nice to have doubled. How’s it to be done?”