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-b.u.t.ton 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 circ.u.mstances.

"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.

G.o.d 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 gra.s.s 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?"

CHAPTER VII

It was a sad, listless little "Princess Lalla" who cupped tiny brown hands about a crystal ball and pretended to read "past, present and future" in its mysterious depths as the afternoon crowd of the carnival's last day in Stanton milled about the attractions in the Palace of Wonders. There was the crack of an unsuspected whip in the voice of Gus, the barker, as he bent over her after his oft-repeated spiel:

"Snap into it, kid! These rubes is lousy with coin and we've got to get our share. You're crabbin' the act somethin' fierce's afternoon. Step on it!"

Sally made a valiant effort to obey, but her crystal-gazing that afternoon was not a riotous success. She made one or two bad blunders, the worst of which caused a near-panic.

For she was so absorbed in her own disappointment and in contemplating the effect of her news upon David, when she should tell him that she was an illegitimate child of a woman who had abandoned her, that her eyes and intuition were not so keen as they had been.

Although there had been a sharp-faced shrew of a wife clinging to his arm before he vaulted upon the platform for a "reading," she mechanically told a meek little middle-aged man that he was in love with a "zo beau-ti-ful girl wiz golden hair" and that he would "marry wiz her."

After the poor husband had been s.n.a.t.c.hed from the platform by his furiously jealous wife and given a most undignified paddling with her hastily removed shoe-an "added attraction" which proved vastly entertaining to the carnival crowd but which caused a good many quarters to find their hasty way back into handbags and trouser pockets-Sally felt her failure so keenly that she leaned backward in an effort to be cautious.

"For G.o.d's sake, kid, snap out of it before the next show!" Gus pleaded, mopping his dripping brow with a huge purple-bordered white silk handkerchief. "I'm part owner of this tent, you know, and you're hittin'

me where I live. Come on, 'at's a good girl! Forget it-whatever's eatin'

on you! This ain't a half-bad world-not a-tall! What if that sheik of yours is trailin' Nita around? Reckon he's just after her grouch bag-"

"Her-grouch bag?" Sally seized upon the unfamiliar phrase in order to put off as long as possible full realization of the heart-stopping news he was giving her so casually.

"That's right. You're still a rube, ain't you? A grouch bag is a show business way of sayin' a performer's got a wad salted down to blow with or buy a chicken farm or, if it's a hard-on-the-eyes dame like Nita, to catch a man with. Nita's got a roll big enough to choke a boa constrictor. I seen her countin' it one night when she thought she was safe. She was, too. I wouldn't warm up to that Jane if she was the last broad in the world. Now, listen, kid, you have a good, hard cry in the dress tent before the next show and you'll feel like a new woman. That's me all over! Never tell a wren to turn off the faucet! Nothin' like a good cry. I ain't been married four times for nothin'."

Sally waited to hear no more. She rushed out of the Palace of Wonders, a frantic, fantastic little figure in purple satin trousers and gold-braided green jacket, her red-sandled feet spurning the gra.s.s-stubbled turf that divided the show tent from the dress tent. And because she was almost blinded with the tears which Gus, the barker, had sagely recommended, she collided with another figure in the "alley."

"Look where you're going, you little charity brat, you --" And Nita's harsh, metallic voice added a word which Sally Ford had sometimes seen scrawled in chalk on the high board fence that divided the boys'

playground from the girls' at the orphanage.

So Nita had listened! She had been eavesdropping when Mrs. Bybee had told Sally the shameful things she had learned from Gramma Bangs about Sally's birth.

"You can't call me that!" Sally gasped, rage flaming over her, transforming her suddenly from a timid, brow-beaten child of charity into a wildcat.

Before Nita, the Hula dancer, could lift a hand to defend herself, a small purple-and-green clad fury flung itself upon her breast; gilded nails on brown-painted fingers flashed out, were about to rip down those painted, sallow cheeks like the claws of the wildcat she had become when powerful hands seized her by the shoulders and dragged her back.

"What t'ell's going on here?" Gus, the barker, panted as Sally struggled furiously, still insane with rage at the insult Nita had flung at her.

"Better keep this she-devil out of my sight, Gus, or I'll cut her heart out!" Nita panted, adjusting the gra.s.s skirt, which Sally's furious onslaught had torn from the dancer's hips, exposing the narrow red satin tights which ended far above her thin, unlovely knees.

"I'm surprised at you, Sally," Gus said severely, but his small eyes twinkled at her. "Next time you're having a friendly argument with this gra.s.s-skirt artist, for Gawd's sake settle it by pulling her hair. The show's gotta go on and some of these rubes like her map. Don't ask me why. I ain't good at puzzles."

Sally smiled feebly, the pa.s.sing of her rage having left her feeling rather sick and foolish. Gus's arm was still about her shoulders, in a paternal sort of fondness, as Nita switched away, her gra.s.s skirt hissing angrily.

"Kinda foolish of you, Sally, to pick a fight with that dame. She could-a ruint this pretty face of yours. She's a bad mama, honey, and you'd better make yourself scarce when she's around. And say, kid-take a tip from old Gus: no sheik ain't worth fightin' for. I been fought over myself considerable in my time, and believe me, while two frails was fightin' for me I was lookin' for another one."

Sally felt shriveled with shame. "I wasn't fighting her because of-of David," she muttered, digging the toe of one little red sandal into the dusty gra.s.s of the show lot. "Nita called me a-a nasty name. You'd have fought, too!"