“You’d—you’d do that—to David, too?” Sally whispered over cold lips.
“I thought that’d get under your skin,” Nita laughed harshly. Then, as though the interview was successfully concluded, from her standpoint, the red-painted nails of her claw-like hands began to pick at the fastening of her grass skirt.
Sally was turning away blindly, feeling like a small, trapped animal, when a tiny, shrill voice came from the midget’s cot:
“I heard every word you said, Nita! I think you must have gone crazy. The heat affects some like this, but I never saw it strike a carnival trouper quite so bad—”
“You shut up, you little double-crossing runt!” Nita whirled toward the midget’s bed.
“I may be a runt,” the midget’s voice shrilled, “but I’m in full possession of my faculties. And when I tell Winfield Bybee the threats you’ve made against this poor child, you’ll find yourself stranded in Stanton without even a grass skirt to earn a living with. And if the carnival grapevine is still working, you’ll find that no other show in the country will take you on. It will be back to the hash joints for you, Nita, and I for one think the carnival will be a neater, sweeter place without you. Get your make-up off and get into bed, Sally. And don’t worry. Nita wouldn’t have dared try to bluff a real trouper like that.”
“For Gawd’s sake, are you all going to jaw all night?” a weary voice, with a flat, southern drawl demanded indignantly. “I’ve got some important sleeping to do, if I’m going to show tomorrow. Gawd, I’m so tired my bones are cracking wide open.”
“Shut up yourself!” Nita snarled, slouching down upon the camp stool beside her trunk, to remove her make-up. “You hoofers don’t know what tired means. If you had to jelly all day like I do! Oh, Gawd! What a life! What a life! You’re right, Midge! It sure gets you—eighteen shows a day and this hell-fired heat.”
It was Nita’s surrender, or at least her pretended surrender, to the law of the carnival—live and let live; ask no questions and answer none.
In the thick silence that followed Sally tremblingly seated herself before her trunk and smeared her neck, face, arms and hands with theatrical cold cream. She was conscious that other weary girls drifted in—“the girl nobody can lift,” the albino girl, whose pink eyes were shaded with big blue goggles; the two diving girls, looking as if their diet of soda pop and bananas eaten under water did not agree with them. But she was aware of them, rather than saw them. Stray bits of their conversation forced through her own conflicting thoughts and emotions—