BY LOUISE RICE
From Ainslee's Magazine
For many hours the hot July sun had beaten down upon the upland meadows and the pine
woods of the lower New Jersey hills. So, when the dew began to fall, there arose from
them a heady brew, distilled from blossoming milkweed and fruiting wild raspberry
canes and mountain laurel and dried pine needles.
The Princess Dora Parse took this perfume into her lusty young lungs and blew it out
again in a long sigh, after which she bent her first finger over her thumb as one must
when one returns what all Romanys know to be "the breath of God." She did this almost
unconsciously, for all her faculties were busied in another matter.
The eyes of a gorgio, weakened by an indoor life, would never have been able to
distinguish the small object for which the princess looked, for she was perched up on the
high seat of the red Romany wardo, and she drove her two strong, shaggy horses with a
free and careless hand. But to Dora Parse the blur of vague shadows gliding by each
wheel was not vague at all. Suddenly she checked her horses and sprang down.
The patteran for which she was looking was laid beneath a clump of the flowering weed
which the Romanys call "stars in the sky." The gorgios know it as Queen Ann's lace, and
the farmers curse it by the name of the wild carrot. The patteran was like a miniature log
cabin without a roof, and across the top one large stick was laid, pointing upward along
the mountain road.
Two brown and slender fingers on the big braid which dropped over her shoulder, the
princess meditated, a shiver of fear running through her. What, she asked herself, could
this mean? Why, for the first time in years, were the wagons to go to the farm of Jan
Jacobus? Even if it were only a chance happening, it was a most unfortunate one, for
young Jan, the fair-haired, giant son of old Jacobus, with his light blue eyes and his
drawling, insolent speech, was the last person in the world that she wanted to see,
especially with her man near.
For she had meant no harm. Many and many a time she had smiled into the eyes of men
and felt pride in her power over them. Still--and yet--The princess scattered the patteran
with her foot, for she knew that all the wagons must be ahead of her, since she had lagged
so, and she leaped to her seat with one easy, lithe swing and drove on up the darkening
road.
Jan Jacobus, like several other descendants of the Dutch settlers of New Jersey, held his
upland farm on shares with John Lane's tribe of gypsies. Jacobuses and Bantas and
Koppfs, they made no bones about having business dealings with the tribe of English
Romanys which had followed a regular route, twice a year, from Maryland to the upper
