“We can’t hide from everyone, Sally,” he said gently. “I think our best bet is to act as if we had had nothing to hide. Remember, we’ve done no wrong. If Carson is dead, he brought his death upon himself. He deserved what he got.”
Trustingly, Sally gave him her hand, stood very small and erect beside him as the big engine thundered down the tracks toward them. Her face was drawn with fatigue but her eyes managed a smile for David. His did not reflect that brave smile, for they were fixed upon the oncoming train.
“By George, Sally, it’s a carnival train! Look! ‘Bybee’s Bigger and Better Show.’ I’d forgotten the carnival was coming. Look over there! There’s one of their signs!”
An enormous poster, pasted upon a billboard, showed a nine-foot giant and a 30-inch dwarf, the little man smoking a huge cigar, seated cockily in the palm of the giant’s vast hand. Big red type below the picture announced: “Bybee’s Bigger and Better Show—Stanton, June 9 and 10. One hundred performers, largest menagerie in any carnival on the road today.”
“I suppose they’re going to spend Sunday here,” David remarked. Then he turned toward Sally, beheld the miracle of her transformed face. “Why, child, you want to go to the carnival, don’t you? Poor little Sally!”
His voice was so tender, so whimsical, so sympathetic, that tears filmed over the brilliance of her sapphire eyes. “I went to a circus once,” she said with the eager breathlessness of a child. “The governor—he was running for office again—sent tickets for all the orphans. And, oh it was wonderful, David! We all planned to run away from the orphanage and join the circus. We talked about it for weeks, but—we didn’t run away. The girls didn’t, I mean, but one of the big boys at the orphanage did and Ruby Presser, the girl he was sweet on, got a postcard from him from New York when the circus was in winter quarters. His name was Eddie Cobb and—oh, the train’s stopping, David! Look!”
“Yes.” David shaded his eyes and squinted down the railroad track. “This is a spur of the main road, a siding, they call it. I suppose the carnival cars will stay here today—”
But for once Sally was not listening to him. She was running toward the cars, from which the engine had been uncoupled, and as she ran she called shrilly, joyously, to a young man who had dropped catlike from the top of a car to the ground:
“Eddie! Eddie Cobb! Eddie!”