The day after they came home from the sea-side they set out on a tour of inspection to make sure everything was as they had left it.
Soon they discovered that old Hobden had blocked their best hedge-gaps with stakes and thorn-bundles, and had trimmed up the hedges where the blackberries were setting.
'it can't be time for the gipsies to come along,' said Una. 'Why, it was summer only the other day!'
'There's smoke in Low Shaw!' said Dan, sniffing. 'Let's make sure!'
They crossed the fields towards the thin line of blue smoke that leaned above the hollow of Low Shaw which lies beside the King's Hill road. It used to be an old quarry till somebody planted it, and you can look straight down into it from the edge of Banky Meadow.
'I thought so,' Dan whispered, as they came up to the fence at the edge of the larches. A gipsy-van - not the show-man's sort, but the old black kind, with little windows high up and a baby-gate across the door - was getting ready to leave. A man was harnessing the horses; an old woman crouched over the ashes of a fire made out of broken fence-rails; and a girl sat on the van-steps singing to a baby on her lap. A wise-looking, thin dog snuffed at a patch of fur on the ground till the old woman put it carefully in the middle of the fire. The girl reached back inside the van and tossed her a paper parcel. This was laid on the fire too, and they smelt singed feathers.
'Chicken feathers!' said Dan. 'I wonder if they are old Hobden's.'
Una sneezed. The dog growled and crawled to the girl's feet, the old woman fanned the fire with her hat, while the man led the horses up to the shafts, They all moved as quickly and quietly as snakes over moss.
'Ah!' said the girl. 'I'll teach you!' She beat the dog, who seemed to expect it.
'Don't do that,' Una called down. 'It wasn't his fault.'
'How do you know what I'm beating him for?' she answered.
'For not seeing us,' said Dan. 'He was standing right in the smoke, and the wind was wrong for his nose, anyhow.'
The girl stopped beating the dog, and the old woman fanned faster than ever.
'You've fanned some of your feathers out of the fire,' said Una.
'There's a tail-feather by that chestnut-tot.'
'What of it?' said the old woman, as she grabbed it.
'Oh, nothing!' said Dan. 'Only I've heard say that tail-feathers are as bad as the whole bird, sometimes.'
That was a saying of Hobden's about pheasants. Old Hobden always burned all feather and fur before he sat down to eat.
'Come on, mother,' the man whispered. The old woman climbed into the van, and the horses drew it out of the deep-rutted shaw on to the hard road.
The girl waved her hands and shouted something they could not catch.
'That was gipsy for "Thank you kindly, Brother and Sister,"' said Pharaoh Lee.
He was standing behind them, his fiddle under his arm.
'Gracious, you startled me!' said Una.
'You startled old Priscilla Savile,' Puck called from below them.
'Come and sit by their fire. She ought to have put it out before they left.'
They dropped down the ferny side of the shaw. Una raked the ashes together, Dan found a dead wormy oak branch that burns without flame, and they watched the smoke while Pharaoh played a curious wavery air.
'That's what the girl was humming to the baby,' said Una.
'I know it,'he nodded, and went on:
'Ai Lumai, Lumai, Lumai! Luludia!
Ai Luludia!'
He passed from one odd tune to another, and quite forgot the children. At last Puck asked him to go on with his adventures in Philadelphia and among the Seneca Indians.
'I'm telling it,' he said, staring straight in front of him as he played. 'Can't you hear?'
'Maybe, but they can't. Tell it aloud,' said Puck.
Pharaoh shook himself, laid his fiddle beside him, and began:
'I'd left Red Jacket and Cornplanter riding home with me after Big Hand had said that there wouldn't be any war. That's all there was to it. We believed Big Hand and we went home again - we three braves. When we reached Lebanon we found Toby at the cottage with his waistcoat a foot too big for him - so hard he had worked amongst the yellow-fever people. He beat me for running off with the Indians, but 'twas worth it - I was glad to see him, - and when we went back to Philadelphia for the winter, and I was told how he'd sacrificed himself over sick people in the yellow fever, I thought the world and all of him. No, I didn't neither. I'd thought that all along. That yellow fever must have been something dreadful. Even in December people had no more than begun to trinkle back to town. Whole houses stood empty and the niggers was robbing them out. But I can't call to mind that any of the Moravian Brethren had died. It seemed like they had just kept on with their own concerns, and the good Lord He'd just looked after 'em. That was the winter - yes, winter of 'Ninety-three - the Brethren bought a stove for the church. Toby spoke in favour of it because the cold spoiled his fiddle hand, but many thought stove-heat not in the Bible, and there was yet a third party which always brought hickory coal foot-warmers to service and wouldn't speak either way. They ended by casting the Lot for it, which is like pitch-and-toss. After my summer with the Senecas, church-stoves didn't highly interest me, so I took to haunting round among the French emigres which Philadelphia was full of. My French and my fiddling helped me there, d'ye see.
They come over in shiploads from France, where, by what I made out, every one was killing every one else by any means, and they spread 'emselves about the city - mostly in Drinker's Alley and Elfrith's Alley - and they did odd jobs till times should mend. But whatever they stooped to, they were gentry and kept a cheerful countenance, and after an evening's fiddling at one of their poor little proud parties, the Brethren seemed old-fashioned. Pastor Meder and Brother Adam Goos didn't like my fiddling for hire, but Toby said it was lawful in me to earn my living by exercising my talents. He never let me be put upon.
