This year, being affiliated with the gipsies in matters of horse-trading (every one knows that the gipsies, men and women,--_roms_ and _juwas_, as they say,--have a profound acquaintance with everything connected with the horse), Rampal had been a fruitful source of information to them. By divers methods they had led him to talk about this and that, about every one and everything. He had no idea himself that he had told so many things. They had questioned him, sometimes directly, taking him unawares; sometimes in a slow, roundabout way; when he was drunk, and when he was asleep. And his replies had been pitilessly registered in the gipsies' unfailing memory--the wherewithal to astonish all Camargue. Rampal had not even been questioned by the gipsy queen, who did not trust his discretion; she learned the secrets of the province at second-hand. Once only had he spoken to her. It was one evening when the beggar queen began to dance for her own amusement on the high-road, to the music of her tambourine, which she hardly ever laid aside. "You are beautiful!" he said to her. "You are ugly!" she replied, quickly, in a contemptuous tone. "Give me the ring on your finger," said Rampal, "and I'll give you another." She glanced with a gleaming eye at her fantastic ring of hammered silver, then at the insolent Christian, and said: "A sound cudgelling about your loins is what I will give you, dog, if you don't leave me!" And she spat fiercely at him as if in disgust. Rampal, somewhat abashed, abandoned the game. This woman had a way of looking at people that disconcerted them. You would say that a sharp, threatening flame shot from her eyes. It penetrated your being, searched your heart, and you were powerless against it. She fathomed your glance, but you could not fathom hers--which, on the contrary, repelled you, turned you back like a solid wall. And, at such moments, she would stand proudly erect, her head thrown slightly back, her whole body poised, at once so sinuous and so rigid, that she might have been compared to a horned viper standing on his tail, fascinating his prey and preparing to spring. "I can't explain, Jacques, how that woman frightened me," said Livette to Renaud. "My blood is still running cold!--She threatened me! And when that crown of thorns fell at my feet--Holy Mother!--I thought I was going to faint!" "If I meet her," Renaud replied, "she'll find she has some one to settle with!" "Let the heathen alone, Jacques! It isn't well to have aught to do with the devil." But the drover loved a fight, and he longed for nothing so much as to fall in with Rampal and Zinzara, the gambler and the queen of the cards; "a pair of gipsies, a pair of thieves," thought Renaud. VII THE MEETING The gipsy queen was the first of the two he met. Renaud, mounted on Blanchet, was riding along the beach toward Saintes-Maries.