Page:Weird Tales Volume 3 Number 3 (1923-03).djvu/19

given up all hope of love from the world, asked only to be despised for herself alone. She flaunted that odd gait of hers down the street; she seemed to invite the laughter of the village folk, and to thrive on the occasional snicker of a small boy that trailed her. It was as though, through these harsh contacts, she gained a heady sense of her own freedom. At this time she was living alone back in the old Gruber house, and she was something of a camp charge.

But our responsibility toward her was of short duration. The sequel was, I suppose, inevitable, and yet I was totally unprepared for it. I had seen Tony Zack several times—once or twice at the trial—and I knew that the gypsies were still hanging about.

Tony did not come again to the Gruber place; he hated and shunned the haunt of the gorgio—the non-gypsy—Zillah informed me. Zillah had visited several times at the gypsy camp, but that seemed to me natural. No, I had no warning beyond a certain new and puzzling remoteness in Zillah herself. Why she did not tell me, I can't say, unless she was ashamed of her weakness.

On a morning of orange sunrise in mid-September, our early breakfast was interrupted by a procession of three canvas-topped vans which invaded our unfinished road.

"Heigh," shouted Murphy, "you can't go no further there! Road's closed."

We loafed out of the mess hall.

A woman had climbed down from the front van, which was painted a lurid yellow, and was calmly removing the wooden horses that barred the way.

"Heigh there!" bellowed Murphy again. "You can't—"

"Mein Gott, it's that Gruber woman—that Old Shoe!" exploded Lutz. "Off again with her gypsy first-love!"

"Zillah!" I called. "O Zillah—"

She turned, she paused uncertainly; but Tony Zack, from his seat on the wagon, jerked his head in peremptory command to her, and she crawled back to her perch beside him. The procession lurched on, took the first fork away from the forbidden road up over the hill. So Zillah passed beside Tony, the silver crescents dangling at her ears. She smiled back, but she did not even wave to me—perhaps Tony, with his hatred of the gorgio, had forbidden it.

"Can ye beat it?" wondered Murphy. "Out of the fryin' pan into the fire: sure, I'd trust Joe Gruber himself before that gypsy divil!"

The air was cool and pungent with the smell of goldenrod and blue asters; I thought, irrelevantly, of a thick, damp night in July. For an instant, before it dropped down out of sight, the yellow van was silhouetted against a bloody gash from the rising sun, like a clean, sharp wound.