She curved her small, brown painted, gilded-nailed hands over the crystal and bent her veiled face low. In a seductive, sing-song voice she began to chant, bringing some of the words out hesitantly, as if English had been recently learned and came hard to her “Turkish” lips:
“I zee ze beeg fields—wheat fields, corn fields—ees it not zo?” She raised her shaded eyes coyly to the face of the young farmer. The crowd pressed close, breathing hard, the odors of their perspiration coming up on hot waves of summer air to the gayly dressed little figure on the platform. “Yes’m, I mean, sure, Princess,” Ross Willis stuttered, and the crowd laughed, pressed closer still. Two or three women waved quarters to attract the attention of Gus, the spieler, who stood behind her, to aid her if necessary.
“You are—what you call it?—a farmer,” Sally went on in her seductively deepened voice. Oh, it was fun to “play-act” and to be paid for it! “You va-ry reach young man. Va-ry beeg farm. You have mother, father, li’l seester.” Thank heaven, her ears had been keen that night of Pearl’s party, even if she had been inarticulate with shyness! “You ar-re in love. I zee a gir-rl, a beeg, pretty gir-rl with red hair an’ blue eyes. Ees it not zo?” Her little low laugh was a gurgle, which started a shout of laughter in the crowd.
“Yeah, I reckon so,” Ross Willis admitted, blushing more violently than ever.
“Oh, you Pearl!” a girl’s voice shrilled from the crowd.
“You mar-ry with thees gir-rl, have three va-ry nize childs,” Sally went on delightedly. After all, why shouldn’t Pearl marry Ross Willis, since she could not have David? “Zo! That ees all I zee,” she concluded with sweet gravity. “Zee creestal she go dark now.”
Ross Willis thanked “Princess Lalla” awkwardly and dropped from the platform to the grass-stubbled ground, entirely unaware that the marvelous seeress was little Sally Ford.
Confidence and mirth welled up in Sally. She began to believe in herself as “Princess Lalla,” just as she had always more than half-believed that she was the queen or the actress whom she had impersonated in the old days so recently ended forever, when she had “play-acted” for the other orphans.
The next seeker after knowledge of “past, present and future” was not so easy, but not very hard either, for the applicant was a girl, a pretty, very urban-looking girl, who wore a tiny solitaire ring on her engagement finger and who had been clinging to the arm of an obviously adoring young man. For the pretty girl Sally obligingly foretold a happy marriage with a “dark, tall young man, va-ry handsome”; a long journey, and two children. The girl sparkled with pleasure, utterly unconscious of the fact that “Princess Lalla” had told her nothing of the past and very little of the present.
Quarters were thrust upon her thick and fast. Because of the brisk demand for her services, Sally gave only the briefest of “readings,” and only a few muttered angrily that it was a swindle. To a middle-aged farmer she gave a bumper wheat crop, a new eight-cylinder car, a prospective son-in-law for the girl whom Sally had unerringly picked out as his unmarried daughter, and the promise of many splendid grandchildren. To a freckled, open-faced, engaging youngster of ten, thrust upon the platform by his adoring mother, she grandly promised nothing less than the presidency of the United States, as well as riches and a beautiful wife.