Page:Barbour--Captain Chub.djvu/405

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CHUB’S ADVENTURE
387

said I. ‘Let me go immediately’—or words to that effect. ‘What you do in my tent?’ asks the pasty-faced gentleman who had caught me. ‘What tent?’ says I, looking as innocent as anything. Then they all broke out again, and pointed, and began to lug me back to their old camp. I went unwillingly, but I went; that is, I went part way. Because, just as we were getting back to it, along comes a cloud of dust with an automobile in it. So I began to yell like anything: ‘Help! Murder! Fire! Thieves!’ And, being a human sort of an automobile, it stopped quick to see what was up. When the dust had blown away I looked up to find Joe Whiting grinning down at me in surprise.

‘Well, what the dickens are you doing here, Eaton?’ he asked.

‘Having my fortune told,’ said I. ‘And I don’t like the way it’s turning out.’

“Well, Whiting had three friends with him—they were touring, it seemed—and it wasn’t more than half a minute until I was in the car with them. The Gipsies didn’t want to let me go. They said I’d been caught stealing; they can talk good enough English when they want to; and they were going to have me arrested. But the fellows