Hours more of "crystal-gazing," of giving lavish promises of "long
journeys," success, wealth, sweethearts, husbands, wives, bumper corn
and wheat crops, babies--until eleven o'clock and the merciful dwindling
of the carnival crowds permitted a weary little "Princess Lalla" to slip
out of the "Palace of Wonders" tent, Pitty Sing, the midget woman,
cradled in her arms like a baby. For Pitty Sing had promptly adopted
Sally as her human sedan chair, uncompromisingly dismissing black-eyed
Nita, the "Hula-Hula" dancer, who had previously performed that service
for her.
"I don't like Nita a bit," the tiny treble voice informed Sally with
great definiteness. "I do like you, and I shall compensate you
generously for your services. Nita has no proper respect for me, though
I command--and I say it without boasting, I hope--twice the salary that
that indecent muscle-dancer does. And she always joggled me."
"Poor Pitty Sing!" Sally soothed her, as she picked her way carefully
over the grass stubble to the big dress tent which also served as
sleeping quarters for the women performers of the "Palace of Wonders."
"Haven't you anyone to look after you? Anyone belonging to you, I mean?"
"Why should I have?" the indignant little piping voice demanded from
Sally's shoulder. "I'm a woman grown, as I've reminded you before. I've
been paying Nita five dollars a week to carry me to and from the show
tent for each performance. Of course there are a few other little things
she does for me, but if you'd like to have the position I think we would
get along very nicely."
"Oh, I'm sure of it!" Sally exalted, laying her cheek for an instant
against the flaxen, marcelled little head. "Thank you, Pitty Sing, thank
you with all my heart!"
"Please don't call me 'Pitty Sing'," the little voice commanded tartly.
"The name does very well for exhibition purposes, but my name is Miss
Tanner--Elizabeth Matilda Tanner."
"Oh, I'm sorry!" Sally protested, hurt and abashed. "I didn't mean--I--"
"But you may call me Betty." The treble was suddenly sweet and sleepy
like a child's. One of the miniature hands fluttered out inadequately to
help Sally part the flaps of the dress tent, which was deserted except
for the fat girl, already asleep and snoring stertorously.
Sally knelt to enable the midget to stand on the beaten down stubble
which served as the only carpet of Sally's new "dormitory."
"Thank you, Sally," the midget piped, her eyes lifted toward Sally out
of a network of wrinkles which testified that she was indeed a "woman
grown." "You're a very nice little girl, and your David is one of the
handsomest men I ever saw."
"_Your David!_" Sally's heart repeated the words, sang them, crooned
over them, but she did not answer, except with one of her rare, sudden,
sweet smiles.
"Nita evidently thinks so, too," the weak little treble went on, as
"Pitty Sing" trotted toward her cot, looking like an animated doll. "I
might as well warn you right now, Sally, that I don't trust that Nita
person as far as I can throw a bull by the horns."
She flung her dire pronouncement over a tiny, pink-silk shoulder as she
knelt before a small metal trunk and reached into her bosom for a key
suspended around her neck on a chain. Sally's desire to laugh at the
preposterous picture of the midget throwing a bull by the horns was
throttled by a new and particularly horrid fear.
"What--do you mean, Betty?" she gasped. "Has Nita--"
"--been vamping your David?" tiny Miss Elizabeth Matilda Tanner finished
her sentence for her. "It would not be Nita if she overlooked a prospect
like your David. It is entirely obvious that he is a person of breeding
and family, even if he is helping Buck in the 'privilege' car kitchen.
Nita is always so broke that she has to eat her meals in the cook tent,
but she borrowed or stole the money today to eat in the privilege car,
and she found it necessary to confer with your David on a purely
fictitious dietetic problem, and then went boldly into the kitchen to
time the eggs he was boiling for her. That Nita!" the tiny voice snorted
contemptuously. "She's as strong as a horse and has about as much need
for a special diet as an elephant has for galoshes. Oh, she's up to her
tricks, not a doubt about that. I just thought I'd warn you in time.
Nita's a man-eating tigress and once she's smelled blood--"
"Thank you, Betty," Sally interrupted gently, as she knelt beside the
midget to help her with the lid of the trunk. "But David isn't _my_
David, you know. He's--he's just a friend who helped me out when I was
in terrible trouble. If Nita likes David, and--he--likes her--"
"Don't be absurd!" the midget scolded her, seating herself on a tiny
stool to take off her baby-size shoes and stockings. "Of course you're
in love with him, and he's crazy about you--a blind person could see
that. Will you untie this shoe-lace, please? My nightgown is in the tray
of the trunk, and you'll find a nightcap there, too. I wear it," she
explained severely, on the defensive against ridicule, "to protect my
marcel. Heaven knows it's hard enough to get a good curl in these hick
towns, with the rubes gaping at me wherever I go. Then please get my
Ibsen--a little green leather book. I'm reading 'Hedda Gabler' now. Have
you read it?"
"Oh, yes!" Sally cried, delightedly. "Do you like to read? Could I
borrow it to read between shows? I'll take awfully good care of it--"
"Certainly I read!" Miss Tanner informed her severely, climbing, with
Sally's help, into her low cot-bed. "My father, who had these little
books made especially for me, was a university professor. I have
completed the college course, under his tutelage. If he had not died I
should not be here," and her little eyes were suddenly bitter with
loneliness and resentment against the whimsy of a Providence that
elected to make her so different from other women.
Sally found the miniature book, small enough to fit the midget's hand,
and gave it to her, then stooped and kissed the little faded, wrinkled
cheek and set about the difficult and unaccustomed task of removing her
make-up. Beside her cot bed she found a small tin steamer trunk,
stencilled in red paint with the magic name, "Princess Lalla." She
stared at it incredulously for a long minute, then untwisted the wire
holding duplicate keys.
When she threw back the lid she found a shiny black tin make-up box,
containing the burnt-sienna powder Mrs. Bybee had used in making her up
for the first day's performances; a big can of theatrical cold cream;
squares of soft cheesecloth for removing make-up; two new towels;
mascara, lip rouge, white face powder, a utilitarian black comb and
brush; tooth paste and tooth brush.
"Oh, these kind people!" she whispered to herself, and bent her head
upon the make-up box and wept grateful tears. Then, smiling at herself
and humming a little tune below her breath, she lifted the tray and
found--not the tell-tale dresses which Pearl Carson had given her and
which had been minutely described by the police in the newspaper account
of the near-tragedy on the Carson farm--but two new dresses, cheap but
pretty, the little paper ticket stitched into the neck of each showing
the size to be correct--fourteen.
She was still kneeling before her trunk, blinded with tears of
gratitude, when a coarse, nasal voice slashed across the dress tent:
"Well, strike me dumb, if it ain't the Princess Lalla in person, not a
movie! Don't tell me you're gonna bunk with us, your highness! I thought
you'd be sawing wood in Pop Bybee's stateroom by this time! What's the
matter he ain't rocking you to sleep and giving you your nice little
bottle?"
Sally rose slowly, the new dresses slithering to the floor in stiff
folds. She batted the tears from her eyes with quick flutters of her
eyelids and then stared at the girl who stood at the tent flap, taunting
her.
She saw a thin, tall girl, naked to the waist except for breastplates
made of tarnished metal studded with imitation jewels. About her lean
hips and to her knees hung a skirt of dried grass, the regulation "hula
dancer" skirt.
"You're--Nita, aren't you?" Sally's voice was small, placating. "I'm--"
"Oh, I know who _you_ are! You're the orphan hussy the police are
lookin' for!" the harsh voice ripped out, as Nita swung into the tent,
her grass skirts swishing like the hiss of snakes. "Furthermore, you're
Pop Bybee's blue-eyed baby girl! And--you're the baby-faced little
she-devil that stole my graft with that little midget! Well, Princess
Lalla, I guess we've been introduced proper now, and we can skip
formalities and get down to business. Hunh?" And she bent menacingly
over Sally, evil black eyes glittering into wide, frightened blue ones,
her mouth an ugly, twisting, red loop of hatred.
Sally backed away, instinctively, from the snake-tongues of venom in
those black eyes. "I'm sorry I've offended you, Miss--Nita.--"
"If you're not you will be! Want me to tip off the police? Well, then,
if you don't, listen, because I want you to get this--and get it good,
all of it!"
Four girls, two of them thin to emaciation, one over-fat, the fourth as
beautifully shaped as a Greek statue, trailed dispiritedly into the
dress tent, their hands groping to unfasten the snaps of their soiled
silk chorus-girl costumes.
Their heavily rouged and powdered faces were drawn with fatigue; their
eyes like burned holes in once-gay blankets. Sally had watched them
dance, enviously, between her own performances, had heard the barker
ballyhooing them as: "Bybee's Follies Girls, straight from Broadway and
on their way back to join their pals in Ziegfeld's Follies."
Now, weary unto death after eighteen performances, the "Follies" girls
shuffled on aching feet to their cots and seated themselves with groans
and dispirited curses, paying not the faintest attention to the tense
tableau presented by Nita, the "Hula" dancer, and the girl they knew as
"Princess Lalla."
Sally's frightened eyes fluttered from one to another of that
bedraggled, pathetic quartet, but she might as well have appealed to the
gaudily painted banners that fluttered over the deserted booths outside.
"What do you want, Nita?" she whispered, moistening her dry lips and
twisting her little brown-painted hands together.
"I'll tell you fast enough!" Nita snarled, thrusting her face close to
Sally's. "I want you to give that sheik of yours the gate--get me? Ditch
him, shake him, and I don't mean maybe!"
For the third time that day Sally was having David Nash, the only friend
she had ever made outside the orphanage, flung into her face as a
sweetheart or worse. Winfield Bybee's casual words to his wife--"Can't
you see she's clear gone on that Dave chap of hers?"--had made her heart
beat fast with a queer, suffocating kind of pleasure, a pleasure she had
never before experienced in her life. Those words had somehow initiated
her into young ladyhood, fraught with strange, lovely, privileges, among
them the right to be "clear gone" on a man--a man like David! The
midget's "your David" and "Of course you're in love with him, and he's
crazy about you--a blind person could see that," had sent her heart
soaring to heaven, like a toy balloon accidentally released from a
child's clutch.
But Nita's "that sheik of yours," Nita's venomously spat command, "give
him the gate, ditch him, shake him," aroused in her a sudden blind fury,
a fury as intense as Nita's.
"I'll do no such thing! David's mine, as long as he wants to be! You
have no right to dictate to me!"
"Is that so?" Nita straightened, hands digging into her hips, a toss of
her ragged, badly curled blond head emphasizing her sarcasm. "Is that
so? Maybe you'll think I had some right when the cops tap you on the
shoulder tomorrow! Too bad you and your David can't share a suite in the
county jail together!"
"You'd--you'd do that--to David, too?" Sally whispered over cold lips.
"I thought that'd get under your skin," Nita laughed harshly. Then, as
though the interview was successfully concluded, from her standpoint,
the red-painted nails of her claw-like hands began to pick at the
fastening of her grass skirt.
Sally was turning away blindly, feeling like a small, trapped animal,
when a tiny, shrill voice came from the midget's cot:
"I heard every word you said, Nita! I think you must have gone crazy.
The heat affects some like this, but I never saw it strike a carnival
trouper quite so bad--"
"You shut up, you little double-crossing runt!" Nita whirled toward the
midget's bed.
"I may be a runt," the midget's voice shrilled, "but I'm in full
possession of my faculties. And when I tell Winfield Bybee the threats
you've made against this poor child, you'll find yourself stranded in
Stanton without even a grass skirt to earn a living with. And if the
carnival grapevine is still working, you'll find that no other show in
the country will take you on. It will be back to the hash joints for
you, Nita, and I for one think the carnival will be a neater, sweeter
place without you. Get your make-up off and get into bed, Sally. And
don't worry. Nita wouldn't have dared try to bluff a real trouper like
that."
"For Gawd's sake, are you all going to jaw all night?" a weary voice,
with a flat, southern drawl demanded indignantly. "I've got some
important sleeping to do, if I'm going to show tomorrow. Gawd, I'm so
tired my bones are cracking wide open."
"Shut up yourself!" Nita snarled, slouching down upon the camp stool
beside her trunk, to remove her make-up. "You hoofers don't know what
tired means. If you had to jelly all day like I do! Oh, Gawd! What a
life! What a life! You're right, Midge! It sure gets you--eighteen shows
a day and this hell-fired heat."
It was Nita's surrender, or at least her pretended surrender, to the law
of the carnival--live and let live; ask no questions and answer none.
In the thick silence that followed Sally tremblingly seated herself
before her trunk and smeared her neck, face, arms and hands with
theatrical cold cream. She was conscious that other weary girls drifted
in--"the girl nobody can lift," the albino girl, whose pink eyes were
shaded with big blue goggles; the two diving girls, looking as if their
diet of soda pop and bananas eaten under water did not agree with them.
But she was aware of them, rather than saw them. Stray bits of their
conversation forced through her own conflicting thoughts and emotions--
"Where's my rabbit foot? Gawd, I've lost my rabbit foot! That means a
run of bad luck, sure--"
"--'n I says, 'Blow, you crazy rube. Whaddye take me for?'"
"Good pickings! If this keeps up I'll be able to grab my cakes in the
privilege car--sold fifty-eight postcards today--"
"Whaddye know? Gus the barker's fell something fierce for the new kid.
'N they say Pop Bybee's got her on percentage, as well as twelve bucks
per and cakes. Some guys has all the luck--"
"Who's the sheik in the privilege car? Don't look like no K. P. to me.
Boy howdy! Hear you already staked your claim, Nita. Who is he?
Millionaire's son gettin' an eyeful of life in raw?"
She knew that Nita did not answer, at least not in words. Gradually talk
died down; weary bodies stretched their aching length upon hard, sagging
cots. Someone turned out the sputtering gas jet that had ineffectually
illuminated the dress tent. Groans subsided into snores or whistling,
adenoidal breathing. A sudden breeze tugged at the loose sides of the
tent, slapping the canvas loudly against the wooden stakes that held it
down.
Although she was so tired that her muscles quivered and jerked
spasmodically, Sally found that she could not sleep. As if her mind were
a motion-picture screen, the events of the day marched past, in very bad
sequence, like an unassembled film. She saw her own small figure
flitting across the screen fantastically clad in purple satin trousers
and green jacket, her face and arms brown as an Indian's, her eyes
shielded by a little black lace veil. Crowds of farmers, their wives,
their children; small-town business men, their wives and giggling
daughters and goggle-eyed sons, avid for a glimpse of the naughtiness
which the barker promised behind the tent flap of the "girlie show,"
pressed in upon her, receded, pressed again, thrust out quarters,
demanded magic visions of her--
David, his eyes streaming with onion tears, smiling at her. David
reading that dreadful newspaper story--David of yesterday, saying, "Dear
little Sally!" pressing her against him for a blessed minute--
And Nita, her eyes rabid with sudden, ugly passion--passion for
David--Nita threatening her, threatening David--
David, David! The movie stopped with a jerk, then resolved itself into
an enormous "close-up" of David Nash, his eyes smiling into hers with
infinite gentleness and tenderness.
"Does he think I'm just a little girl, too young to--to be in love or to
be loved?" she asked herself, audacious in the dark. "If--if he was at
all in love with me--but oh, he couldn't be!--would he be so friendly
and easy with me? Wouldn't he be embarrassed, and blush, and--and things
like that? Oh, I'm just being silly! He doesn't think of me at all
except as a little girl who's in trouble. A girl alone, as he calls me."
Then a new memory banished even the "close-up" of David on the screen of
her mind--a memory called up by those words--"girl alone." She felt that
she ought to weep with shame and contrition because she had so long
half-forgotten Mrs. Bybee's promise to make inquiries about her
mother--the mother who had given her to the orphanage twelve years
before, leaving behind her only a meager record--"Mrs. Nora Ford, aged
twenty-eight."
So little in those words with which to conjure up a mother! She would be
forty now, if--if she were still alive! Suddenly all her twelve years of
orphanhood, of longing for a mother, even for a mother who would desert
her child and go away without a word, rushed over Sally like an
avalanche of bruising stones. Every hurt she had sustained during all
those twelve motherless years throbbed with fresh violence; drew hard
tears that dripped upon the lumpy cotton pillow beneath her tossing
head.
When the paroxysm of weeping had somewhat subsided she crept out of her
cot and knelt beside it and prayed.
Then she crept back into bed, unconscious that the midget was still
awake and had seen her dimly in the darkness. Strangely free of her
burdens, Sally lay for a long time before sleep claimed her, trying to
remember all the instructions about crystal-gazing that Mrs. Bybee had
heaped upon her. And in her childish conscience there was no twinge or
remorse that she was to go on the next day, deceiving the public, as
"Princess Lalla, favorite crystal-gazer of the Sultan of Turkey."
The next morning--the carnival's second and last day in Stanton--Sally
overslept. She did not awaken until a tiny hand tugged impatiently at
her hair. Her dark blue eyes flew wide in startled surprise, then
recognition of her surroundings and of "Pitty Sing," the midget, dawned
in them slowly.
"You looked so pretty asleep that I hated to awaken you," the midget
told her. "But it's getting late, and I want my breakfast. I'm dressed."
The little woman wore a comically mature-looking dress of blue linen,
made doll-size, by a pattern which would have suited a woman of forty.
Sally impulsively took the tiny face between her hands and laid her lips
for an instant against the softly wrinkled cheek. Then she sprang out of
bed, careful not to "joggle" the midget, who had been so emphatic about
her distaste for being joggled.
"There's a bucket of water and a tin basin," Miss Tanner told her
brusquely, to hide the pleasure which Sally's caress had given her. "All
the other girls have gone to the cook tent, so you can dress in peace."
"I didn't thank you properly last night for taking my part against
Nita," Sally said shyly, as she hastily drew on her stockings. "But I do
thank you, Betty, with all my heart. I was so frightened--for David--"
"What I said to Nita will hold her for a while." Betty Tanner nodded
with satisfaction. "But I don't trust her. She'll do something underhand
if she thinks she can get away with it. But don't worry. Once the
carnival gets out of this state, you and your David will be pretty safe.
I don't think the police will bother about extradition, even if Nita
should tip them off. In the meantime, I'll break the first law of
carnival and try to learn something of Nita's past. I've seen her turn
pale more than once when a detective or a policeman loomed up
unexpectedly and seemed to be giving her the once-over. Oh, dear, I'm
getting to be as slangy as any of the girls," she mourned.
After Sally had splashed in the tin basin and had combed and braided her
hair, she hesitated for a long minute over the two new dresses that had
mysteriously found their way into the equally mysterious new tin trunk.
She caught herself up at the thought. Of course they were not
mysterious. "Pop" and Mrs. Bybee had provided them, out of the infinite
kindness of their hearts. Were they always so kind to the carnival's new
recruits? Gratitude welled up in her impressionable young heart;
overflowed her lips in song, as she dressed herself in the little white
voile, splashed with tiny blue and yellow wild flowers.
Last night's breeze had brought with it a light, cooling shower, and
still lingered under the hot caress of the June sun. Sally sang, at
Betty's request, as she sped across vacant lots to the show train
resting engineless on a spur track. At the sound of her fresh, young
voice, caroling an old song of summertime and love, David Nash thrust
his head out of the little high window in the box of a kitchen at the
end of the dining car, and waved an egg-beater at her, lips and teeth
and eyes flashing gay greetings to her.
"Better tell your David how Nita's been carrying on," the midget piped
from Sally's shoulder.
Song fled from Sally's throat and heart. "No," she shook her head. She
couldn't be a tattle-tale. If the orphanage had taught her nothing else
it had taught her not to be a tale-bearer. Besides, to talk of Nita and
her threats would make it necessary to tell David all that Nita had
said, and at the thought Sally's cheeks went scarlet. It might kill his
friendship for her to let him know that others--apparently all the
carnival folk--had labeled that friendship "love." Why couldn't they let
her and David alone? Why snatch up this beautiful thing, this precious
friendship, and maul it about, sticking labels all over it until it was
ruined?
She had placed the midget in her own little high chair at her own
particular table in the privilege car and was hurrying down the car
bound for the cook tent and her own breakfast when Winfield Bybee and
his wife entered. Mrs. Bybee was dressed as if for a journey of
importance.
Winfield Bybee boomed out a greeting to Sally, tilting his head to peer
into her smiling blue eyes.
"All dolled up and looking pretty enough to eat," he chuckled. "Ain't
that a new dress?"
"Oh, yes, and it fits perfectly," Sally glowed. "Thanks so very much for
the trunk and the dresses, Mrs. Bybee," she added, tactfully addressing
the showman's wife. "I--I'll pay you back out of my salary as I make
it--"
"What are you talking about?" Mrs. Bybee demanded sternly, her eyes
flashing from Sally's flushed face to her husband's. "I never bought you
any dresses or a trunk. Now, you looka here, Winfield Bybee! I'm a woman
of few words, and of a long-suffering disposition, but even a saint
knows when she's got a stomachful! I swallowed your mealy-mouthed
palaverin' about this poor little orphan, but if you're sneaking around
and buying her presents behind my back, I'll turn her right over to the
state and not lose a wink of sleep, and let me tell you this, Winfield
Bybee--" Her words were a rushing torrent, heated to the boiling point
by jealousy and suspicion.
Sally tried to speak, to interrupt her, but she might as well have tried
to stop the Niagara. Under the force of the torrent Sally at last bowed
her head, shrinking against the wall of the car, the very picture of
detected guilt. The carnival owner gasped and waved his arms helplessly,
tried to pat his wife's hands and had his own slapped viciously for his
pains. When at last Mrs. Bybee paused for breath, and to mop her
perspiring face with her handkerchief, Bybee managed to get in his
defense, doggedly, his bluster wilted under his wife's tongue lashing:
"You're crazy, Emma! I didn't buy her any presents. I never saw that
dress before in my life. I don't know what you or she's talking about. I
didn't buy her anything! I--oh, good Lord!" He tried to put his arms
about his wife, his face so strutted with blood that Sally felt a faint
wonder, through her misery, that apoplexy did not strike him down.
"What's the matter, Sally?" David came striding out of the kitchen, a
butcher knife in one hand and a slab of breakfast bacon in the other.
"I don't know, David," she whispered forlornly. "I--I was just thanking
Mrs. Bybee for this dress and another one and a trunk I found in the
dress tent with my name on it--'Princess Lalla'--" she stammered over
the name--"and Mrs. Bybee says she didn't give them to me."
"He thought he'd put something over on me, and me all dressed up like a
missionary to go look for her precious mother. I guess her mother wasn't
any better than she should have been and this little soft-soap artist
takes after her," Mrs. Bybee broke in stridingly, but her angry eyes
lost something of their conviction under David's level gaze.
"I bought the things for Sally, Mrs. Bybee," he said quietly. "I should
have told her, or put my card in. Unfortunately I didn't have one with
me," he added with a boyish grin.
"Oh!" Anger spurted out of Mrs. Bybee's jealous heart like air let out
of a balloon. "Reckon I'm just an old fool! God knows I don't see why I
should care what this old woman-chaser of a husband of mine does, but--I
do! If you're ever in love, Sally, you'll understand a foolish old woman
a little better. Now, young man, you take that murderous looking knife
and that bacon back into the kitchen and scramble a couple of eggs for
me. And I guess you can give Pop a rasher of that bacon, even if it is
against the doctor's orders."
And the showman, beaming again and throwing "Good mornings" right and
left, marched down the aisle, his arm triumphantly about his repentant
wife's shoulders.
Sally watched them for a moment, a lovely light of tenderness and
understanding playing over her sensitive face. Then she turned to David,
who had not yet obeyed Mrs. Bybee's command. They smiled into each
other's eyes, shyly, and the flush that made Sally's face rosy was
reflected in the boy's tanned cheeks.
"I'm sorry, David, I didn't dream it was--you. Thank you, David." She
could not keep from repeating his name, dropping it like a caress at the
end of almost every sentence she addressed to him, as if her lips kissed
the two slow, sweet syllables.
"I should have told you," David confessed in a low voice, slightly
shaken with embarrassment and some other emotion which flickered behind
the smile in his gold-flecked hazel eyes. "I--I thought you'd know. You
needed the things and I knew you didn't have any money. I've got to get
back into the kitchen," he added hastily, awkwardly. She had never seen
him awkward in her presence before, and she was daughter of Eve enough
to rejoice. And in her shy joy her face blossomed with sudden rich
beauty that made Nita, the Hula dancer, who appeared in the doorway at
that moment, look old and tawdry and bedraggled, like the last ragged
sunflower withering against a kitchen fence.
But not even Nita's flash of hatred and veiled warning could blight that
sudden sweet blooming of Sally's beauty. She waved goodby to David,
carrying away with her as she sped to the cook tent the heart-filling
sweetness and tenderness of his answering smile. She took out the memory
of that smile and of his boyish flush and awkwardness a hundred times
during the morning, to look at in fresh wonder, as a child repeatedly
unearths a bit of buried treasure to be sure that it is still there.
When she bent her little head gravely over the crystal, after the
carnival had opened for the day, she saw in it not other people's
"fortunes" but David's flushed face, David's shy, tender eyes, David's
lips curled upward in a smile. And because she was so happy she lavished
happiness upon all those who thrust quarters upon Gus, the barker, for
"Princess Lalla's" mystic reading of "past, present and future."
She had almost forgotten, in her preoccupation with the miracle which
had happened to her--for she knew now that she loved David, not as a
child loves, but as a woman loves--that Mrs. Bybee was undoubtedly
keeping her promise to make inquiries about the woman who had given her
name as Mrs. Nora Ford when she had committed Sally Ford to the care of
the state twelve years before. But she was sharply reminded and filled
with remorse for her forgetfulness when Gus, the barker, leaned close
over her at the end of a performance to whisper:
"The boss' ball-and-chain wants to see you in the boss' private car,
kid. Better beat it over there before you put on the nose bag. Next show
at one-fifteen, if we can bally-hoo a crowd by then. You can tell her
that Gus says you're going great!"
As Sally ran across lots to the side-tracked carnival train, she buried
her precious new memory of David under layers of anxiety and questions.
It would still be there when her question had been answered by Mrs.
Bybee, to comfort her if the showman's wife had been unsuccessful, to
add to her joy if some trace of her mother had been found.
"Maybe--maybe I'll have a mother and a sweetheart, too," she marveled,
as she climbed breathless, into the coach which had been pointed out to
her as the showman's private car.
It was not really a private car, for Bybee and his wife occupied only
one of the drawing rooms of the ancient Pullman car, long since retired
from the official service of that company. The berths were occupied on
long jumps by a number of the stars of the carnival and by some of the
most affluent of the concessionaires and barkers, a few of the latter
being part owners of such attractions as the "girlie show" and the
"diving beauties." When the carnival showed in a town for more than a
day, however, the performers usually preferred to sleep in tents, rather
than in the stuffy, hot berths.
Since the carnival was in full swing at that hour of the day, Sally
found the sleeping car deserted except for Mrs. Bybee, who called to her
from the open door of drawing room A.
The carnival owner's wife was seated at a card table, which was covered
with stacks of coins and bills of all denominations. Her lean fingers
pushed the stacks about, counted them, jotted the totals on a sheet of
lined paper.
"I'm treasurer and paymaster for the outfit," she told Sally,
satisfaction glinting in her keen gray eyes. "Me and Bill," and she
lifted a big, blue-barreled revolver from the faded green plush of the
seat and twirled it unconcernedly on her thumb.
"Is business good?" Sally asked politely, as she edged fearfully into
the small room.
"Might be worse," Mrs. Bybee conceded grudgingly. "Sit down, child, I'm
not going to shoot you. Well, I went calling this morning," she added
briskly, as she began to rake the stacks of coins into a large canvas
bag.
"Oh!" Sally breathed, clasping her hands tightly in her lap. "Did
you--find anything?"
Mrs. Bybee knotted a stout string around the gathered-up mouth of the
bag, rose from her seat, lifted the green plush cushion, revealing a
small safe beneath the seat. When she had stowed the bag away and
twirled the combination lock, she rearranged the cushion and took her
seat again, all without answering Sally's anxious question.
"Reckon I'm a fool to let anyone see where I keep the coin," she
ridiculed herself. "But after making a blamed fool of myself this
morning over them dresses your David give you, I guess I'd better try to
do something to show you I trust you. You just keep your mouth shut
about this safe, and there won't be any harm done."
"Of course I won't tell," Sally assured her earnestly. "But, please, did
you find out anything?" She felt that she could not bear the suspense a
minute longer.
"You let me tell this my own way, child," Mrs. Bybee reproved her.
"Well, you saw that missionary rig I had on this morning? It turned the
trick all right. Lucky for you, this ain't the fastest growing town in
the state, even if that billboard across from the station does say so. I
found the address you gave me, all right. Same number, same house.
Four-or-five-room dump, that may have been a pretty good imitation of a
California bungalow twelve years ago. All run-down now, with a swarm of
kids tumbling in and out and sticking out their tongues at me when their
ma's back was turned. She said she'd lived there two years; moved here
from Wisconsin. Didn't know a soul in Stanton when she moved here, and
hadn't had time to get acquainted with a new baby every fourteen
months."
"Poor thing!" Sally murmured, finding pity in her heart for the
bedraggled drudge Mrs. Bybee's words pictured so vividly. But those
too-numerous babies had a mother. What she wanted to know was--did she,
Sally Ford, have a mother?
Then a memory, so long submerged that she did not realize that it
existed in her subconscious mind, pushed up, spilled out surprisingly:
"There was a big oak tree in the corner of the yard. I used to swing.
Someone pushed the swing--someone--" she fumbled for more, but the
memory failed.
"It's still there, and there's still a swing," Mrs. Bybee admitted. "One
of those dirty-faced little brats was climbing up and down the ropes
like a monkey. Well, I reckon that's where you used to live, right
enough. I asked this woman--name of Hickson--if any of her neighbors had
lived there many years, and she pointed to the house next door and said
'Old Lady Bangs' owned the house and had lived there for more'n twenty
years. This old Mrs. Bangs--"
"Bangs!" Sally cried. "Bangs! It was Gramma Bangs who swung me! I
remember now! Gramma Bangs. She made me a rag doll with shoe-button eyes
and I cried every night for a long time after I went to the orphanage
because mama hadn't brought my doll. Did you see Gramma Bangs? Oh, Mrs.
Bybee, if I could go to see her again!"
Mrs. Bybee's stern, long, hatchet-shaped face had softened marvelously,
but at Sally's eager request she shook her head emphatically.
"Not with the police looking for you and Dave. Yes, I saw her. She's all
crippled up with rheumatism and was tickled to death to see Nora Ford's
sister. That's who I said I was, you know. But it pretty near got me
into trouble. The old lady took it for granted I knew a lot of things
about you that I didn't know, and wouldn't have told me just what I'd
come to find out if I hadn't used my bean in stringing her along. I had
to go mighty easy asking her about you, since it was my 'sister' I was
supposed to be so het up over finding, but lucky for you she'd been
reading the papers and knew that you were in trouble."
"Oh!" Sally moaned, covering her hot face with her little brown-painted
hands. "Then Gramma Bangs thinks I'm a bad girl--oh! Did you tell her
I'm not?"
"What do you take me for--a blamed fool?" Mrs. Bybee demanded heatedly.
"I didn't let on I'd ever seen you in my life. But it was something she
let spill when she was talking about you and this story in the papers
that give me the low-down on the whole thing."
"Oh, what?" Sally implored, almost frantic with impatience.
"Well, she said, 'You can't blame Nora for putting Sally in the
orphanage when the money stopped coming, seeing as how she was sick and
needing an operation and everything. But it pret' near broke her
heart'--that's what the old dame said--"
"But--I don't understand," Sally protested, her sapphire eyes clouding
with bewilderment. "The money? Did she mean my--father?"
"I thought that at first, too." Mrs. Bybee nodded her bobbed gray head
with satisfaction. "But lucky I didn't say so, or I'd have give the
whole show away. I just 'yes, indeeded' her, and she went on. Reckon she
thought I might be taking exceptions to the way she'd been running on
about how pitiful it was for 'that dear little child' to be put in an
orphans' home, so she tried to show me that my 'sister' had done the
only thing she could do under the circumstances.
"Pretty soon it all come out. 'Nora,' she said, 'told me not to breathe
a word to a soul, but seeing as how you're her sister and probably know
all about it, I reckon it won't do no harm after all these years.' Then
she told me that Nora Ford had no more idea'n a jack rabbit whose baby
you was--"
"Then she wasn't my mother!" Sally cried out in such a heartbroken voice
that Mrs. Bybee reached across the card table and patted her hands,
dirty diamonds twinkling on her withered fingers.
"No, she wasn't your mother," the showman's wife conceded with brusque
sympathy. "But I can't see as how it leaves you any worse off than you
was before. One thing ought to comfort you--you know it wasn't your own
mother that turned you over to an orphanage and then beat it, leaving no
address. Seems like," she went on briskly, "from what old lady Bangs
told me, that Nora Ford had been hired to take you when she was a maid
in a swell home in New York, and she had to beat it--that was part of
the agreement--so there never would be any scandal on your real mother.
She didn't know whose kid you was--so the old lady says--and when the
money orders stopped coming suddenly she didn't have the least idea how
to trace your people. She supposed they was dead--and I do, too. So it
looks like you'd better make up your mind to being an orphan--"
"But, oh, Mrs. Bybee!" Sally cried piteously, her eyes wide blue pools
of misery and shame. "My real mother must have been--bad, or she
wouldn't have been ashamed of having me! Oh, I wish I hadn't found out!"
And she laid her head down on her arms on the card table and burst into
tears.
"Don't be a little fool!" Mrs. Bybee admonished her severely. "Reckon it
ain't up to you, Sally Ford, to set yourself up in judgment on your
mother, whoever she was."
"But she sent me away," Sally sobbed brokenly. "She was ashamed of me,
and then forgot all about me. Oh, I wish I'd never been born!"
"I reckon every kid's said that a hundred times before she's old enough
to have good sense," Mrs. Bybee scoffed. "Now, dry up and scoot to the
dress tent to put some more make-up on your face. The show goes on. And
take it from me, child, you're better off than a lot of girls that join
up with the carnival. You're young and pretty and you've got a boy
friend that'd commit murder for you and pret' near did it, and you've
got a job that gives you a bed and cakes, and enough loose change to buy
yourself some glad rags by the time we hit the Big Town--"
"The Big Town?" Sally raised her head, interest dawning unwillingly in
her grieving blue eyes. "You mean--New York?"
"Sure I mean New York. We go into winter quarters there in November, and
if you stick to the show I may be able to land you a job in the chorus.
God knows you are pretty enough--just the type to make every six-footer
want to fight any other man that looks at you."
"Oh, you're good to me!" Sally blinked away the last of her tears, which
had streaked her brown make-up. "I'll stick, if the police don't get
me--and David. And," she paused at the door, her eyes shy and sweet,
"thank you so very much for trying to help me find my--my mother."
As she sped down the aisle of the car in her noiseless little red
sandals she was startled to see what looked like a sheaf of yellow,
dried grass whisked through the closing door of the women's dressing
room. Then comprehension dawned. "I wonder," she took time from the
contemplation of her desolating disappointment to muse, "what Nita is
doing here. I wonder if she followed me--if she heard anything I
wouldn't want Nita to know about my mother. But I'll tell David. Will he
despise me because my mother was--bad?"