And Sally lay on the lumpy, smelly mattress of her upper berth in the ancient Pullman car, waiting for her David's whistled signal-a bar of "Always." She was fully dressed.

Her heart sang the words-"I'll be loving you-always! Not for just an hour, not for just a day, not for just a year, but-always!"

She could have sent word to David by Gus or Pop Bybee that she had given up her frantic plan to run away; that he need not meet her in the darkness of the pulsing, hot June night. But-she had not-

It came then-clear and true, the whistled notes of the song which her heart sang to David-"I'll be loving you-always!"

She edged over the side of the berth, the toe of her slipper groping until it found the edge of the lower berth in which the midget was sleeping. When she was safe in the aisle she cast a fearful glance up and down the car, and noted with uneasy surprise that Nita's berth, directly opposite the midget's, was still unoccupied, the green curtains spread wide so that the grayish-white blur of the sheet and pillow was plainly discernible in the faint light from the one electric globe over the door.

But she had no time now to worry about Nita or Nita's threats. David was awaiting her-with the song still humming its sweet, extravagant promise in his heart. Or-was it? Had he chosen the song idly? Had he meant anything by that teasing kiss on the tip of her nose, by his "Dear little Sally!"

"Being in love hurts something terrible," Sally shook her head at her own turbulent emotions, unconsciously employing the homely language of the orphanage. "But even if he doesn't love me I'm glad I love him.

David, David!"

CHAPTER VIII

The night was eerie with voices from unseen bodies, or bodies half-revealed in the flare of gasoline torches, as the business of loading the carnival proceeded. Soft, rich voices from black men's throats blended with the velvety softness of the late-June night:

"Oh, if Ah had wings like an angel, Over these prison walls Ah would fly!

Ah would fly to the ahms of my poah dahlin', An' theah Ah'd be willin' to die."

A lonesome, heart-breaking plaint. Sally shivered. Except for David and Pop Bybee and Dan, the barker, she and David might have been behind prison bars tonight, learning the shame and misery that had created that song.

A white roustabout said something evil to her out of the corner of his mouth as she brushed past him on her way to join David. But she scarcely noticed, for there was David, his shoulders looming immensely broad in the dark coat he had donned in her honor. Her hands were out to him before he had reached her, and when he took them both and laid them softly against his breast, so that her leaping blood caught the rhythm of his strongly beating heart, she could scarcely restrain herself from raising her small body on tip-toe and lifting her face for his kiss.

They were shy at first, as they drifted away from the show train across the vacant lot where the carnival had so recently vended trickery and truth, freaks and fakes, color and light and noise and music. They walked softly, slowly, Sally having the absurd feeling that if the gra.s.s stubble were tender, tiny flowers, her joy-light feet would not have crushed them. Her fingers were intertwined with David's, and the electric thrill of that contact seemed to be the motor force which propelled her body. Without a word as to direction, they drifted, completely in accord, toward a clump of trees which would some day, when Stanton had become beauty-conscious, form the nucleus of a park.

Sally felt that she was in a spell woven of the beauty and breathlessness of the night and of her inarticulate joy as, still without speaking, David took off his coat and spread it upon the ground that sloped gently from the st.u.r.dy trunk of an oak tree. As he was stooping to spread the coat her hand hovered over his head, aching to touch the dear, waving crispness of his hair, yet not daring-quite. But when he straightened more suddenly than she had expected, his head fitted into the cup of her hovering hand before she could s.n.a.t.c.h it away.

He whirled upon her, sweeping her slight body to his breast with such fierceness and suddenness that her head swam.

"Sally! Sally!" Just that hoa.r.s.e cry, muted, exultant.

Her hands crept slowly up his breast, so loving every inch of the dear body whose warmth came through the cloth of his shirt that they abandoned it reluctantly. When her hands were on his shoulders, clinging there, she threw her head back upon the curve of his right arm, and smiled up into his face. Her lips parting slowly to let out a little gasping sigh of joy.

In the silvery sheen with which the moon joyously and approvingly bathed them their eyes, wide, dark, luminous, clung for an aeon of time, reckoned in the history of love. Then David, knowing that his unasked question had been gloriously answered, bent his head until his lips touched hers.

He must have felt the slight stiffening of her body, the ardor in her small hands as they clung more fiercely to his shoulders. For he flung up his head, then turned it sharply away for a moment, as if ashamed for her to see the pa.s.sion in his eyes. She took a drunken, uncertain step away from him, and his arms fell laxly from her body.

"What is it, David?" she asked in a small, quavering voice, scarcely more than a whisper.

"I shouldn't have done that!" David reproached himself with boyish bitterness.

"But David," Sally pleaded, in that small quaver, "don't you-don't you love me-at all? I thought-I-" Her hands fluttered toward him, then dropped hopelessly as he still stood sharply turned away from her.

"Yes, I love you. That's the devil of it," David groaned from the shelter of his arm. "I love you so much I can't think of anything else, not even of our danger."

She crept closer to him, stroked timidly the clenched fist which hung at his side. "Then-why, David? I-I love you, too. You-must-have known. I love you with all my heart." She stooped swiftly and laid her lips against his knuckles, which shone white as marble in the moonlight.

"Don't!" he cried sharply. He lowered the arm that had sheltered his shamed, pa.s.sionate eyes and looked at her humbly, his whole body drooping. "Don't you see, darling-no, I mustn't call you that!-don't you see, Sally, that your-caring-only makes it worse? I wish I were the only one that has to suffer. But you're so young-oh, G.o.d!" he cried in sudden anguish. "You're so pitifully young! Sixteen! I ought to be horsewhipped!"

She laughed shakily. "I'm getting older every day, David. Is it such a crime to be young? You're young, too, David-darling!" The word was dropped shyly, on a tremulous whisper.

"That's it!" David cried wildly, fiercely under his breath. "We're both young! I'm just half through college, and I haven't a cent to my name except what I earned those two weeks on Carson's farm. And I won't have any money except barely enough to live on-I work my way through college-until I've finished school. And then it will be a long, hard struggle to get a start, unless my grandfather dies by then and leaves me his farm. He's a miserly old man, darling. He thinks I'm a fool to study scientific farming, won't give me a cent. I haven't wanted it-till now."

"And now, David?" she prompted softly, her fingers closing caressingly about the clenched hand which she must not kiss.

"I want to marry you, of course!" David flung the confession at her sternly. "I love you so much it's torture to think of your going on to New York with the carnival. Oh, it's all so hopeless! We're in such a nasty jam, Sally, darling!" He groaned, s.n.a.t.c.hed up her hands, kissed them hungrily, pa.s.sionately, then dropped them as if the soft, sweet flesh stung his lips. "Don't let me kiss you, Sally! For G.o.d's sake! I can't stand it! And it's not fair to you to learn what love means, when-when we can't go through with it."

"But why can't we, David?" she persisted, her love giving her amazing boldness. "I'll never love anyone else. I'll wait for you, for years and years. Until I'm eighteen and you're twenty-three. You're almost twenty-one, aren't you, David?"

"Yes," he acknowledged. "But I'm just a kid. Why, I'm a minor yet!" he reminded her with youth's bitter shame. "And so are you. We couldn't even get married legally. And we're both-wanted-by the police. I can't even figure out how I'm going to get back into A. & M. and finish my course. I couldn't let you marry a man wanted for attempted murder, even if I could support you. Oh, I guess I could make a bare living for us, but I don't want that! Not for you! I want you to have everything lovely in the world. You've had so little, so little! I want you to have silk and velvet to make you forget blue-and-white-checked gingham. I want-"

he was going on pa.s.sionately when Sally interrupted with her soft delicious little laugh.

"I want David," she said simply.

"All right!" he cried, flinging his arms wide in a gesture of utter abandonment. "We'll run away tonight. We'll keep going until we get out of the state. We'll lie about our ages. We'll find someone somewhere to marry us, and we'll-have each other if we have nothing else in the world, Sally!"

His exultant young voice and his arms demanded her, but she held back strangely, while her face went ghastly white and old in the moonlight.

"I-I forgot to tell you my news," she said dully, tonelessly, her hands flattened against her breast. "Mrs. Bybee found out something about-about my mother, about me."

Ecstasy was wiped from David's face, leaving it hurt and bewildered. "So you're going to find her? Go back to her? I-I suppose I'm glad."

"No," she shook her head drearily. "I can't marry you or-anyone, David.

My mother was not Mrs. Nora Ford. I don't know who she was! I don't even know what my name really is-if I have a name! Whoever my mother was she was ashamed I'd been born, she paid Mrs. Ford to take me away when I was an infant, away from New York, so-so I wouldn't disgrace her. I'm the ugly name Nita called me today. I'm-I'm-"

"You're my Sally," David said gently, his arms gathering her in, holding her comfortingly against his breast, in a pa.s.sionless embrace of utter tenderness. "Do you think I would let that make any difference at all?

If anything could, it would make me love you more. But I love you now with every bit of me. And we'll be married, Sally. What do I care about being a scientific farmer?" But there was a note of bravado, of regret in his voice that did not escape her love attuned ears.

"No, David," she whispered, her hands straying over his face as if memorizing every dear line of it. "We'll wait. I can wait. I've waited twelve years to find my mother, and I didn't give up hope until today. I would wait twice twelve years for you. I'll stick with the carnival if Pop Bybee will let me, and if the police don't find us. Then when you're through college-?"

"But I'm d.a.m.ned if I can see how I'm to get back!" David burst out. "We are both trapped in this second-rate carnival-and a first rate one would be bad enough!"

"We won't have to stay after we get to New York," Sally interrupted reasonably. "We can start life again. This trouble will blow over. You might even learn some other profession in the east-"

"I don't want to learn anything else, live anywhere else but in the middle west. It's my land. I love it. I want to serve it. But, oh, Sally, let's not torture ourselves any more. I know I mustn't marry you under this cloud, but let's be happy for a few minutes before we go back to the show train. No, don't, darling!" as she lifted her arms. "Just sit there on my coat and let me look at you. You're the most beautiful thing in the world. Lovely Sally!"

They sat side by side, hands not touching but hearts reaching toward each other, and the minutes slipped silently away as David drank in her moon-silvered young beauty, and she fed her love-hunger upon his Viking-like handsomeness and strength. They were silently agreeing to go when a sharp, metallic voice materialized suddenly out of the hush of the darkness.

"No monkey-business now, Steve! I'm warning you! If you double-cross me I'll cut your heart out! Fifty-fifty and-"

The rest was lost as the couple pa.s.sed on, walking swiftly, two shadows that seemed like one. The voice was Nita's.