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 fict.i.tious 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 st.i.tched into the neck of each showing the size to be correct-fourteen.

She was still kneeling before her trunk, blinded with tears of grat.i.tude, when a coa.r.s.e, 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 gra.s.s, 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 gra.s.s 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 gra.s.s 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 gra.s.s 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 h.e.l.l-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 n.o.body 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 una.s.sembled 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 pa.s.sion-pa.s.sion 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 embarra.s.sed, 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."