When Sally was awakened soon after dawn the next morning--Wednesday--by
the shouts and songs of the "white hopes" unloading the carnival on the
outskirts of the Capital City, the question which had insisted on
worming its way through the heavenly joy of knowing that David loved her
sprang instantly to the foreground of her mind; who was "Steve" with
whom Nita had quarreled and bargained in the dark last night?
Sally and David had met or had had pointed out to them nearly every
member of the show troupe, and there was no Steve among them. Of course
Steve might be one of the roughneck white roustabouts. But a star
performer, such as Nita considered herself, would hardly consort with
such a man. The two classes--simply did not mix, except in rare
instances. David of course was different. Everyone connected with the
carnival knew that he was a university student, working in the kitchen
with Buck only because he was hiding from the police.
Then the thought of David dismissed Nita and her threats and her Steve.
She crawled out of her berth, scurried to the women's dressing room and
hastily applied her show make-up. Pop Bybee had summoned her to the
privilege car on her return from her momentous walk with David the night
before to caution her not to appear in Capital City, even in the dress
or cook tent, without her "Princess Lalla" complexion, which she was to
apply with exceeding care so that the disguise might be impenetrable.
Because the carnival lot selected by "the Kidder," Pop Bybee's advance
man and "fixer," was in the heart of the city, and the railroad spur
allotted to the show train on the outskirts of it, the cars would be
abandoned by the carnival performers and employes, only Pop and Mrs.
Bybee continuing to occupy their drawing room in one of the Pullmans.
Sally, being told the arrangements, suspected that they stayed with the
train to guard the safe under the green plush seat, the existence of
which was known only to Sally. Mrs. Bybee took little interest in the
carnival itself, caring only for the heaviness of the canvas money bags,
which were brought to her at the end of each day's business.
It was still not seven o'clock when Sally joined the straggling
procession of performers headed for the cook tent and dress tent, a
quarter of a mile from the show train. She knew very little of the city
itself, since the orphanage was situated on its own farm in a thinly
settled suburb.
There was no glow of pride, no sense of home-coming as she trudged
through the almost deserted streets, but every time she passed a
policeman idly swinging his "billie" on a street corner she thanked Pop
Bybee in her heart that he had cautioned her to don her disguise. For
beyond a casually interested glance at her brown face and hands and her
long swinging braids of fine, lustrous black hair, the law did not seem
to find her worthy of attention.
If only David could pass that cordon successfully! Probably he had gone
to the carnival grounds. But Pop Bybee, true to his promise to protect
the boy, had decreed that he should become private chef and waiter to
himself and Mrs. Bybee, remaining cooped up all day in the privilege car
of the show train.
Poor David! Dear David! Her heart ached passionately for his loneliness,
for his magnificent body caged in a hot box of a kitchen, when it had
been so gloriously free in fragrant, sun-kissed fields before she had
met him.
Why, he might almost as well be in jail! And he had done nothing but
protect a girl alone in the world from the cruel revenge of a man who
had promised the state to treat her as his own daughter.
But even though her heart throbbed with pain for David she could not be
wholly sad, for he loved her, wanted to marry her, would even now be
married to her if she had let him give up his ambitions for her.
By the time she had finished breakfast in the cook tent the carnival was
nearly ready for business. Even the Ferris wheel's glittering immensity
was flung toward the sky, the basket seats hanging motionless in the
still, hot air. Banners advertising real and spurious wonders were being
tacked upon scarred booths, endowing them with glamor: "Bybee's Follies
Girls--a dazzlingly beautiful chorus straight from Ziegfeld's Follies in
New York--Six reasons why men leave home"; "Beautiful Babe, the Fattest
Girl in the World! 620 pounds of rosy, cuddly girl flesh"; "The Palace
of Wonders--Greatest Aggregation of Freaks in the World; also Princess
Lalla, from Constantinople, crystal-gazer, escaped member of the
Sultan's Harem; Sees all, knows all--Past, Present and Future!"
Sally wandered along the midway, waving a small brown hand to Eddie
Cobb, who was setting up his gambling wheel and gaudily dressed Kewpie
dolls; exchanged predictions as to the day's business with two or three
good-natured concessionaires; won a gold-toothed smile from the
henna-haired girl who sold tickets for the tin rabbit races.
But she soon discovered that she was restless and lonely. The carnival
had no glamor in these early hours. Without the crowds there was no
glamor; the crowds themselves, though they did not suspect it, furnished
the glamor with their naive credulity, their laughter, their free and
easy spending, their susceptibility as a relief from the monotony of
their lives, to the very spirit of carnival for which this draggled old
hoyden of a show was named.
"The kids would love it," Sally remembered suddenly, seeing in a
painfully bright flash of memory the oldish, wistful little faces of
Betsy and Thelma and Clara and all the other orphans who had until so
recently--though it seemed years ago--been her only friends and
playmates.
"I wonder if Eloise Durant is terribly unhappy, or if she has found some
other 'big girl' to pet her. I wonder if Betsy and Thelma and Clara miss
my play-acting."
She smiled at the picture of herself draped in a sheet and crowned with
her own braids:--an ermine cloak and a crown of gold adorning a queen!
"If they could see me now! Play-acting all the time, all dressed up in
purple satin trousers and a green satin jacket all glittery with gold
braid! I wish I had lots of money, so I could send them all tickets to
come to the carnival," her thoughts ran on, as homesickness for the
place she had hoped never to see again rose up, treacherous and
unwelcome, to dim her joy in the glorious miracle of David's love.
"I suppose," she confessed forlornly, "that Mrs. Stone is the only
mother I'll ever know. I wish I'd always been good, so she wouldn't
believe the awful things Clem Carson said about me. She thinks I'm bad
now--like my mother. I wonder," she was startled, her face flushing
hotly under the brown powder, "if I am bad! They say it's in the blood.
I'm crazy to have David kiss me, and--and he had to ask me not to. Maybe
David is afraid I'm bad, too."
The thought was unbearable. She wanted to fly to David, to search his
gold-flecked hazel eyes again, to see if he had lost any of his
"respect" for her. But she wouldn't kiss him! She'd bite her tongue out
first! She was going to be good, good, prove to herself and David and
all the world that "it" wasn't in her blood.
But all day, as the crowds gathered and money clinked merrily as it fell
into cash boxes, she longed for David; lived over every kiss he had
given her, from the brushing of his lips against the tip of her nose to
that dizzying wedding of lips when their love had been confessed in the
moonlight.
And because she was bemused with romance, thrilling with her own
awakening to love, she made an almost riotous success of her
crystal-gazing that first day of the carnival in Capital City. Girls
laughed shyly and cuddled against their sweethearts provocatively as
they left the Palace of Wonders, determined to make "Princess Lalla's"
enchanting prophecies come true.
And she was so seductively beautiful herself, asparkle with love as she
was, that three or four unaccompanied young men, seeking knowledge of
the present, past and future, suggested that she fulfil her own
prophecies of a "zo beautiful brunette," until, embarrassed though
flattered, she took refuge in assuming that all gentlemen prefer
blondes.
She did not see David that night after the carnival had shut up shop,
for he could not leave the show train and only male performers, barkers
and concessionaires were permitted to hang around the train. Sally
understood from the midget, "Pitty Sing," that a nightly poker game
attracted the men to the privilege car and that fist-fighting and even
gun-play was no uncommon break in the monotony. Pop Bybee, genial until
he heard the rattle of poker chips, was the heaviest winner as a rule,
many a performer's salary finding its way back into the stateroom safe
within a few hours after Mrs. Bybee had reluctantly handed it over.
By Thursday afternoon Sally's confidence in the efficacy of her disguise
had mounted perilously high. The policemen who strolled grandly through
the tents, proud of not having to pay for their fun, accorded her
admiration or good-natured skepticism but no suspicion.
The city papers had apparently lost interest in the hunt for David Nash,
university student and farm hand, wanted for assault with intent to kill
and for moral delinquency, and in Sally Ford, runaway ward of the state
and juvenile paramour of the youthful would-be murderer, as the papers
had previously described them.
At least there were no references to the case in either Wednesday's or
Thursday's papers, and Sally's heart was light with gratitude to David
and Pop Bybee for having persuaded her to stick with the carnival. It
was rather fun to be on exhibition, reading the fortunes of the very
policemen who had been given her description and orders to "get"
her--much more fun than fleeing along state roads at night and hiding in
cornfields by day, hungry, exhausted, afraid of her shadow and of the
more menacing shadow of the state reformatory.
"Hel-lo! Hel-lo! Bless my soul! What have we here? A real live Turkish
harem beauty, as I live!"
Sally aroused herself from her apparently absorbing gazing into the
"magic crystal" and looked with wide, startled eyes at the man who had
addressed her in an accent which at once marked him as an easterner of
culture. She had seen pictures of men dressed like that, but had never
quite believed in their authenticity.
But her eyes did not linger long on his slim, elegant, immaculate
figure, leaning lightly on a cane. His laughing, wise, cynical eyes
challenged her and invited her to share his amusement with him. But in
their bold black depths was something else....
----
"Quite delicious, really!" the man with the cultured, eastern accent
drawled, leaning more nonchalantly on his cane and twinkling his too
wise, too bold black eyes at "Princess Lalla."
"But really now, I wouldn't say you're a freak, your highness. In fact,
you're quite the most delicious little morsel I've seen since I left New
York. If I were a Ziegfeld scout I assure you I'd be burbling your
praises in a ruinously verbose telegram, and the devil take the expense.
Would you mind lifting that scrap of black lace that is tantalizing me
most provokingly? I am tormented with the hope that your big eyes are
really the purple pansies they appear to be through your veil.
"No?" He shook his head with humorous resignation as Sally shook her
head in violent negation. "Well, well! One can't have everything, and
really your arms and your adorable little hands and your Tanagra
figurine body should be quite enough--as an appetizer. You don't happen
to 'spell' the Hula dancer--the ancient but still hopeful lady who has
just been exercising her hips for my benefit--do you? But I suppose that
is too much to ask of Providence. Life is full of these bitter
disappointments, these nagging, unsatisfied desires--"
"Please!" Sally gasped, forgetting her carefully acquired accent which
had been bequeathed her, by way of Mrs. Bybee, by the erstwhile
"Princess Lalla," now in the hospital, minus her appendix, but still too
weak to jeopardize Sally's job. "I--I'm not permitted to talk to the
audience--"
"Child, child!" the New Yorker protested, raising a beautifully kept
hand admonishingly. "Spare me! I'm always being met with signs like that
in New York--in elevators, busses, what-nots--But since I am intrigued
with the music of your voice--a very young and un-Turkish voice, if I
may be permitted to say so--I shall be delighted to cross your little
brown palm with silver, provided you will guarantee that your make-up
does not rub off. I'm deplorably finicky."
Sally, overwhelmed by his gift for monologue, uttered in a teasing,
bantering, intimate voice of beautiful cadences, looked desperately
about her for help. But she was temporarily deserted by both audience
and barker. Gus was at the moment ballyhooing Jan, the Holland giant,
the chief attraction of the Palace of Wonders. His recital of the vast
quantities of food which the nine-foot-nine giant consumed daily never
failed to hold the crowd enthralled.
"You'll have to wait till Gus, the barker, starts my performance," she
told him nervously, making no effort to deceive the blase New Yorker by
a tardy resumption of her "Turkish" accent. "But--oh, please go away!
Don't tease me! You'll spoil the show if you make Smart-Aleck remarks on
everything I say and do."
"Smart-Aleck?" The easterner raised his silky black brows, while his
humorous but cruel mouth, beneath a small, exact black mustache,
twitched with a rather rueful smile. "Child, that is the unkindest cut
of all! If I had been reared west of Fifth Avenue or a little farther
downtown I would undoubtedly phrase it as a nasty crack! But we'll let
it pass."
He walked nonchalantly up the steps leading to her platform and stood
before her, only the small, black-velvet-draped table with the crystal
between them.
When he spoke again, in his humorous drawl, with his bold black eyes
twinkling and challenging her, his words could not have been heard by
anyone ten feet away: "Will you permit me, your highness, to read the
crystal for you? I'm really rather a wizard at it--a wow, as they say on
Broadway, though I assure you, your highness, that I'm not a man to
succumb to the insidiousness of slang. You must be rather tired of
gazing, gazing, gazing into this intriguing but slightly flawed ball of
glass--" and he touched it with a long, delicate finger, with a humorous
contemptuousness that suggested an intimate bond between the
professional and the amateur--himself and herself.
"Please go away!" Sally pleaded breathlessly. "Why do you want to make
fun of me? I have to earn my living somehow--"
"Do you?" he smiled, his brows going higher, while deep laugh wrinkles
appeared suddenly in the clear olive of his lean cheeks. "Now I'm sure
you should let me read the crystal for you, for it is obvious that you
have not looked into the future at all!"
He cupped his slim, beautiful hands about the crystal, his back bending
in an arch as graceful as the arch of a cat's back. The posture brought
his face very near to hers, so that she saw the fine grain of his skin,
caught a faint, indefinable but enchanting odor from his sleek dark
hair, almost as dark as her own.
He had dropped his hat upon the edge of the little table, and it too
fascinated and repelled her, for its dove-gray richness insolently
suggested that its owner possessed boundless money and almost wickedly
sure taste.
But every item of his dress told the same story, so she really should
not have picked on the hat particularly. But she did; she wanted to
brush it off the table, to see his flash of anger at its being soiled
with the dust from "rubes'" feet--
"Marvelous!" His voice became mockingly hushed and mysterious, as he
pretended to gaze into the very heart of the crystal. "I see your whole
past boiling away in this magic crystal--slightly flawed, though it is!"
"My past!" she shivered, forgetting that he was faking just as she did.
"You've run away from home, from poverty," he went on in that mocking,
too beautiful voice, his black eyes shifting from the crystal to play
their insolent, confident fire upon her wide-eyed face. "And you've run
away from--a man! Of course," he added lightly, "you'll always be
running away from a man--men--every man that looks at you. You're
absolutely irresistible, you know, child! But ah, at last you will find
him--the man from whom you will not run away! Now, shall I read the
future for you?"
"Please, go away. Gus is coming!" Sally pleaded through childishly
quivering lips that would have showed ashen-pale if they had not been
thickly overlaid with carmine.
"Dear old Gus! I look forward to being pals with Gus, when I give him
the password. Now, the future--ah, my dear, what a future! Broadway!
Bright lights! Music! And Princess Lalla in the chorus first, the most
adorable little 'pony' of them all! I shall sit in the bald-headed row
and toss roses to you, child, and whisper to the eggs next me that 'I
knew her when'--when she was a delicious little fake Turkish princess,
escaped from the Sultan's harem. And I see a man--let me look closely--a
tall, dark man, rather handsome--" and he laughed insolently into her
eyes.
"La-dees and gen-tle-men! Right this way, please! I want you all to meet
Princess Lalla, from Con-stan-ti-no-ple--"
Gus, the barker, was approaching with long, swift strides, the crowd
milling behind him, like sheep following a bellwether.
"I'll finish your future in our next seance." The New Yorker
straightened, smiled into her eyes unhurriedly, bowed mockingly, lifted
his hat, placed it on his sleek head, retrieved his cane which had been
leaning against the crystal stand, and vaulted lightly to the ground.
Gus eyed him menacingly, suspiciously, but beamed when the easterner
pressed a bill into his hands and withdrew to the outskirts of the
crowd, where he evidently intended to listen to the spieler's
introduction of Princess Lalla.
Sally got through her performance somehow, burningly conscious of bold
black eyes regarding her admiringly. When she pattered down the steps
and along the flattened stubble of the earth floor of the tent on her
way to the dress tent to rest between shows, a slim, immaculate figure
detached itself from the crowd that was wandering reluctantly toward the
exit.
"Cook tent fare must grow rather monotonous," his low, drawling voice
stopped her. "I suggest relief--supper with me after the last
performance tonight. I am stopping at the governor's mansion, and have
the use of one of the official limousines. Credentials enough?" He
raised his eyebrows whimsically but his detaining grasp of her arm was
not nearly so gentle as his voice.
"No, no!" Sally cried. "I--I'm not that kind of girl! Please let me
go--"
"Oh, spirit of H. L. Mencken, hear me!" the New Yorker prayed. "Do girls
in the middle west really say that still? I wouldn't have believed it!
'I'm not that kind of girl!'" he repeated, laughing delightedly. "Of
course you aren't, darling! No girl ever is! And heaven forbid that I
should be the sort of man--fellow, you say out here?--that you evidently
believe I am! Now that we understand each other, I again suggest supper,
a long, cooling drive in the governor's choicest limousine--the old boy
does himself rather well in cars, at the expense of the state--and a
continuation of my extremely accurate reading of your future."
"No!" Sally flared, her timidity submerged in anger. "Let me go this
minute! I don't like you! I hate you! If you don't turn loose my arm,
I'll--I'll scream 'Hey rube'--"
"What a dire threat!" the New Yorker laughed with genuine amusement. "Am
I the rube? Is that your idea of a taunt so crushing that--"
"It means," Sally said with cold fury, "that every man connected with
the carnival will rush into this tent and--and simply tear you to
pieces! It's the S O S signal of the circus and carnival, and it always
works! Now--will you let me go? I swear I'll scream 'Hey, rube!' if you
don't--"
"And I had planned such a delicious supper," the New Yorker mourned
mockingly as he slowly released her arm, as if reluctant to forego the
pleasure that rounded slimness and smoothness gave his highly educated
fingers.
Sally cried a little in the dress tent, but she was too angry to give
way utterly to tears. The thought which stung her pride most hurtingly
was that the New Yorker had seen something bad in her eyes, something of
the mother of whose shame she was a living witness.
"But--I guess I showed him!" she told herself fiercely as she dabbed
fresh brown powder on her tear-streaked face. "He won't dare bother me
again."
But he did dare. He was a nonchalant, smiling, insolent figure, leaning
on his cane, as she went through the next performance. She pretended not
to see him, but never for a moment, as she well knew, did his cold black
eyes waver from their ironic but admiring contemplation of her
enchanting little figure in purple satin trousers and green jacket.
And at the late afternoon performance--four o'clock--he was there again,
his fine, cruel, humorous mouth smiling at his own folly. She thought of
appealing to Gus, the barker, to forbid him admission to the tent, but
she knew Gus was too good a business man to heed such a wasteful
request. Besides, the barker seemed to like him, or at least to like
immensely the bill which invariably passed hands when the showman and
the glorified "rube" met.
Then suddenly, at ten minutes after four, the New Yorker ceased to have
any significance at all to her, at least for the moment. He was wiped
out completely in the flood of terror and joy that swept over her brain,
making her so dizzy that she leaned against the crystal stand for
support.
For tumbling into the tent of the Palace of Wonders came a horde of
children, boys and girls, the girls dressed exactly alike in skimpy
little white lawn dresses trimmed with five-cent lace, the boys in ugly
suits of stiff "jeans."
Her playmates from the orphanage had come to see "Princess Lalla,"
lately Sally Ford, ward of the state and now fugitive from "justice."