“I should have told you,” David confessed in a low voice, slightly shaken with embarrassment 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.