This sense of treading untrodden ground roused in Ma a venturesome spirit of independence, an unsuspected capacity for adventure, and when the wealth of her discoveries failed to awaken interest in her family she ceased reporting them and became more solitary than ever in her habits.

Every morning she slipped out of the hotel, meandered through the grounds apparently without purpose, but in reality pursuing a circuitous route and taking sudden twistings and turnings to throw pursuers off the scent.

Ever deeper into the wilderness she penetrated, but with the sly caution of an old fox returning to its lair, for she was always being followed by wicked people, such, for instance, as minions of the law, members of the Black Hand, foreign spies, gen-darmys, and detectifs.
Having baffled them all, she laughed scornfully, flung deceit to the winds, then hurried straight to the "fastness," and there uttered the tribal call.

At the sound her gypsy band came bounding forth to meet her, and she gave them her royal hand to kiss, raising them graciously when they knelt, giving a kind word here or a sharp reprimand there.
They were the fiercest gypsies in the world, and quarrelsome, too.

They were forever fighting among themselves and crying: "Curse you, Jack Dalton! Take that!" and plunging swords into one another, but they had good hearts and they loved Ma and were devoted to her lost cause.