CHAPTER IX

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 cla.s.ses-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 pa.s.sed 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, l.u.s.trous black hair, the law did not seem to find her worthy of attention.

If only David could pa.s.s 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 pa.s.sionately 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, embarra.s.sed though flattered, she took refuge in a.s.suming 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 a.s.sault 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 grat.i.tude 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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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 a.s.sure you I'd be burbling your praises in a ruinously verbose telegram, and the devil take the expense.

Would you mind lifting that sc.r.a.p 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 quant.i.ties 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 pa.s.s."

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 a.s.sure you, your highness, that I'm not a man to succ.u.mb to the insidiousness of slang. You must be rather tired of gazing, gazing, gazing into this intriguing but slightly flawed ball of gla.s.s-" 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-