Girl Alone Part 14

Then a new memory banished even the "close-up" of David on the screen of her mind-a memory called up by those words-"girl alone." She felt that she ought to weep with shame and contrition because she had so long half-forgotten Mrs. Bybee's promise to make inquiries about her mother-the mother who had given her to the orphanage twelve years before, leaving behind her only a meager record-"Mrs. Nora Ford, aged twenty-eight."

So little in those words with which to conjure up a mother! She would be forty now, if-if she were still alive! Suddenly all her twelve years of orphanhood, of longing for a mother, even for a mother who would desert her child and go away without a word, rushed over Sally like an avalanche of bruising stones. Every hurt she had sustained during all those twelve motherless years throbbed with fresh violence; drew hard tears that dripped upon the lumpy cotton pillow beneath her tossing head.

When the paroxysm of weeping had somewhat subsided she crept out of her cot and knelt beside it and prayed.

Then she crept back into bed, unconscious that the midget was still awake and had seen her dimly in the darkness. Strangely free of her burdens, Sally lay for a long time before sleep claimed her, trying to remember all the instructions about crystal-gazing that Mrs. Bybee had heaped upon her. And in her childish conscience there was no twinge or remorse that she was to go on the next day, deceiving the public, as "Princess Lalla, favorite crystal-gazer of the Sultan of Turkey."

The next morning-the carnival's second and last day in Stanton-Sally overslept. She did not awaken until a tiny hand tugged impatiently at her hair. Her dark blue eyes flew wide in startled surprise, then recognition of her surroundings and of "Pitty Sing," the midget, dawned in them slowly.

"You looked so pretty asleep that I hated to awaken you," the midget told her. "But it's getting late, and I want my breakfast. I'm dressed."

The little woman wore a comically mature-looking dress of blue linen, made doll-size, by a pattern which would have suited a woman of forty.

Sally impulsively took the tiny face between her hands and laid her lips for an instant against the softly wrinkled cheek. Then she sprang out of bed, careful not to "joggle" the midget, who had been so emphatic about her distaste for being joggled.

"There's a bucket of water and a tin basin," Miss Tanner told her brusquely, to hide the pleasure which Sally's caress had given her. "All the other girls have gone to the cook tent, so you can dress in peace."

"I didn't thank you properly last night for taking my part against Nita," Sally said shyly, as she hastily drew on her stockings. "But I do thank you, Betty, with all my heart. I was so frightened-for David-"

"What I said to Nita will hold her for a while." Betty Tanner nodded with satisfaction. "But I don't trust her. She'll do something underhand if she thinks she can get away with it. But don't worry. Once the carnival gets out of this state, you and your David will be pretty safe.

I don't think the police will bother about extradition, even if Nita should tip them off. In the meantime, I'll break the first law of carnival and try to learn something of Nita's past. I've seen her turn pale more than once when a detective or a policeman loomed up unexpectedly and seemed to be giving her the once-over. Oh, dear, I'm getting to be as slangy as any of the girls," she mourned.

After Sally had splashed in the tin basin and had combed and braided her hair, she hesitated for a long minute over the two new dresses that had mysteriously found their way into the equally mysterious new tin trunk.

She caught herself up at the thought. Of course they were not mysterious. "Pop" and Mrs. Bybee had provided them, out of the infinite kindness of their hearts. Were they always so kind to the carnival's new recruits? Grat.i.tude welled up in her impressionable young heart; overflowed her lips in song, as she dressed herself in the little white voile, splashed with tiny blue and yellow wild flowers.

Last night's breeze had brought with it a light, cooling shower, and still lingered under the hot caress of the June sun. Sally sang, at Betty's request, as she sped across vacant lots to the show train resting engineless on a spur track. At the sound of her fresh, young voice, caroling an old song of summertime and love, David Nash thrust his head out of the little high window in the box of a kitchen at the end of the dining car, and waved an egg-beater at her, lips and teeth and eyes flas.h.i.+ng gay greetings to her.

"Better tell your David how Nita's been carrying on," the midget piped from Sally's shoulder.

Song fled from Sally's throat and heart. "No," she shook her head. She couldn't be a tattle-tale. If the orphanage had taught her nothing else it had taught her not to be a tale-bearer. Besides, to talk of Nita and her threats would make it necessary to tell David all that Nita had said, and at the thought Sally's cheeks went scarlet. It might kill his friends.h.i.+p for her to let him know that others-apparently all the carnival folk-had labeled that friends.h.i.+p "love." Why couldn't they let her and David alone? Why s.n.a.t.c.h up this beautiful thing, this precious friends.h.i.+p, and maul it about, sticking labels all over it until it was ruined?

She had placed the midget in her own little high chair at her own particular table in the privilege car and was hurrying down the car bound for the cook tent and her own breakfast when Winfield Bybee and his wife entered. Mrs. Bybee was dressed as if for a journey of importance.

Winfield Bybee boomed out a greeting to Sally, tilting his head to peer into her smiling blue eyes.

"All dolled up and looking pretty enough to eat," he chuckled. "Ain't that a new dress?"

"Oh, yes, and it fits perfectly," Sally glowed. "Thanks so very much for the trunk and the dresses, Mrs. Bybee," she added, tactfully addressing the showman's wife. "I-I'll pay you back out of my salary as I make it-"

"What are you talking about?" Mrs. Bybee demanded sternly, her eyes flas.h.i.+ng from Sally's flushed face to her husband's. "I never bought you any dresses or a trunk. Now, you looka here, Winfield Bybee! I'm a woman of few words, and of a long-suffering disposition, but even a saint knows when she's got a stomachful! I swallowed your mealy-mouthed palaverin' about this poor little orphan, but if you're sneaking around and buying her presents behind my back, I'll turn her right over to the state and not lose a wink of sleep, and let me tell you this, Winfield Bybee-" Her words were a rus.h.i.+ng torrent, heated to the boiling point by jealousy and suspicion.

Sally tried to speak, to interrupt her, but she might as well have tried to stop the Niagara. Under the force of the torrent Sally at last bowed her head, shrinking against the wall of the car, the very picture of detected guilt. The carnival owner gasped and waved his arms helplessly, tried to pat his wife's hands and had his own slapped viciously for his pains. When at last Mrs. Bybee paused for breath, and to mop her perspiring face with her handkerchief, Bybee managed to get in his defense, doggedly, his bl.u.s.ter wilted under his wife's tongue las.h.i.+ng:

"You're crazy, Emma! I didn't buy her any presents. I never saw that dress before in my life. I don't know what you or she's talking about. I didn't buy her anything! I-oh, good Lord!" He tried to put his arms about his wife, his face so strutted with blood that Sally felt a faint wonder, through her misery, that apoplexy did not strike him down.

"What's the matter, Sally?" David came striding out of the kitchen, a butcher knife in one hand and a slab of breakfast bacon in the other.

"I don't know, David," she whispered forlornly. "I-I was just thanking Mrs. Bybee for this dress and another one and a trunk I found in the dress tent with my name on it-'Princess Lalla'-" she stammered over the name-"and Mrs. Bybee says she didn't give them to me."

"He thought he'd put something over on me, and me all dressed up like a missionary to go look for her precious mother. I guess her mother wasn't any better than she should have been and this little soft-soap artist takes after her," Mrs. Bybee broke in stridingly, but her angry eyes lost something of their conviction under David's level gaze.

"I bought the things for Sally, Mrs. Bybee," he said quietly. "I should have told her, or put my card in. Unfortunately I didn't have one with me," he added with a boyish grin.

"Oh!" Anger spurted out of Mrs. Bybee's jealous heart like air let out of a balloon. "Reckon I'm just an old fool! G.o.d knows I don't see why I should care what this old woman-chaser of a husband of mine does, but-I do! If you're ever in love, Sally, you'll understand a foolish old woman a little better. Now, young man, you take that murderous looking knife and that bacon back into the kitchen and scramble a couple of eggs for me. And I guess you can give Pop a rasher of that bacon, even if it is against the doctor's orders."

And the showman, beaming again and throwing "Good mornings" right and left, marched down the aisle, his arm triumphantly about his repentant wife's shoulders.

Sally watched them for a moment, a lovely light of tenderness and understanding playing over her sensitive face. Then she turned to David, who had not yet obeyed Mrs. Bybee's command. They smiled into each other's eyes, shyly, and the flush that made Sally's face rosy was reflected in the boy's tanned cheeks.

"I'm sorry, David, I didn't dream it was-you. Thank you, David." She could not keep from repeating his name, dropping it like a caress at the end of almost every sentence she addressed to him, as if her lips kissed the two slow, sweet syllables.

"I should have told you," David confessed in a low voice, slightly shaken with embarra.s.sment and some other emotion which flickered behind the smile in his gold-flecked hazel eyes. "I-I thought you'd know. You needed the things and I knew you didn't have any money. I've got to get back into the kitchen," he added hastily, awkwardly. She had never seen him awkward in her presence before, and she was daughter of Eve enough to rejoice. And in her shy joy her face blossomed with sudden rich beauty that made Nita, the Hula dancer, who appeared in the doorway at that moment, look old and tawdry and bedraggled, like the last ragged sunflower withering against a kitchen fence.

But not even Nita's flash of hatred and veiled warning could blight that sudden sweet blooming of Sally's beauty. She waved goodby to David, carrying away with her as she sped to the cook tent the heart-filling sweetness and tenderness of his answering smile. She took out the memory of that smile and of his boyish flush and awkwardness a hundred times during the morning, to look at in fresh wonder, as a child repeatedly unearths a bit of buried treasure to be sure that it is still there.

When she bent her little head gravely over the crystal, after the carnival had opened for the day, she saw in it not other people's "fortunes" but David's flushed face, David's shy, tender eyes, David's lips curled upward in a smile. And because she was so happy she lavished happiness upon all those who thrust quarters upon Gus, the barker, for "Princess Lalla's" mystic reading of "past, present and future."

She had almost forgotten, in her preoccupation with the miracle which had happened to her-for she knew now that she loved David, not as a child loves, but as a woman loves-that Mrs. Bybee was undoubtedly keeping her promise to make inquiries about the woman who had given her name as Mrs. Nora Ford when she had committed Sally Ford to the care of the state twelve years before. But she was sharply reminded and filled with remorse for her forgetfulness when Gus, the barker, leaned close over her at the end of a performance to whisper:

"The boss' ball-and-chain wants to see you in the boss' private car, kid. Better beat it over there before you put on the nose bag. Next show at one-fifteen, if we can bally-hoo a crowd by then. You can tell her that Gus says you're going great!"

As Sally ran across lots to the side-tracked carnival train, she buried her precious new memory of David under layers of anxiety and questions.

It would still be there when her question had been answered by Mrs.

Bybee, to comfort her if the showman's wife had been unsuccessful, to add to her joy if some trace of her mother had been found.

"Maybe-maybe I'll have a mother and a sweetheart, too," she marveled, as she climbed breathless, into the coach which had been pointed out to her as the showman's private car.

It was not really a private car, for Bybee and his wife occupied only one of the drawing rooms of the ancient Pullman car, long since retired from the official service of that company. The berths were occupied on long jumps by a number of the stars of the carnival and by some of the most affluent of the concessionaires and barkers, a few of the latter being part owners of such attractions as the "girlie show" and the "diving beauties." When the carnival showed in a town for more than a day, however, the performers usually preferred to sleep in tents, rather than in the stuffy, hot berths.

Since the carnival was in full swing at that hour of the day, Sally found the sleeping car deserted except for Mrs. Bybee, who called to her from the open door of drawing room A.

The carnival owner's wife was seated at a card table, which was covered with stacks of coins and bills of all denominations. Her lean fingers pushed the stacks about, counted them, jotted the totals on a sheet of lined paper.

"I'm treasurer and paymaster for the outfit," she told Sally, satisfaction glinting in her keen gray eyes. "Me and Bill," and she lifted a big, blue-barreled revolver from the faded green plush of the seat and twirled it unconcernedly on her thumb.

"Is business good?" Sally asked politely, as she edged fearfully into the small room.

"Might be worse," Mrs. Bybee conceded grudgingly. "Sit down, child, I'm not going to shoot you. Well, I went calling this morning," she added briskly, as she began to rake the stacks of coins into a large canvas bag.

"Oh!" Sally breathed, clasping her hands tightly in her lap. "Did you-find anything?"

Mrs. Bybee knotted a stout string around the gathered-up mouth of the bag, rose from her seat, lifted the green plush cus.h.i.+on, revealing a small safe beneath the seat. When she had stowed the bag away and twirled the combination lock, she rearranged the cus.h.i.+on and took her seat again, all without answering Sally's anxious question.

"Reckon I'm a fool to let anyone see where I keep the coin," she ridiculed herself. "But after making a blamed fool of myself this morning over them dresses your David give you, I guess I'd better try to do something to show you I trust you. You just keep your mouth shut about this safe, and there won't be any harm done."

"Of course I won't tell," Sally a.s.sured her earnestly. "But, please, did you find out anything?" She felt that she could not bear the suspense a minute longer.

"You let me tell this my own way, child," Mrs. Bybee reproved her.

"Well, you saw that missionary rig I had on this morning? It turned the trick all right. Lucky for you, this ain't the fastest growing town in the state, even if that billboard across from the station does say so. I found the address you gave me, all right. Same number, same house.