As she sped down the aisle of the car in her noiseless little red sandals she was startled to see what looked like a sheaf of yellow, dried grass whisked through the closing door of the women’s dressing room. Then comprehension dawned. “I wonder,” she took time from the contemplation of her desolating disappointment to muse, “what Nita is doing here. I wonder if she followed me—if she heard anything I wouldn’t want Nita to know about my mother. But I’ll tell David. Will he despise me because my mother was—bad?”
CHAPTER VII
It was a sad, listless little “Princess Lalla” who cupped tiny brown hands about a crystal ball and pretended to read “past, present and future” in its mysterious depths as the afternoon crowd of the carnival’s last day in Stanton milled about the attractions in the Palace of Wonders. There was the crack of an unsuspected whip in the voice of Gus, the barker, as he bent over her after his oft-repeated spiel:
“Snap into it, kid! These rubes is lousy with coin and we’ve got to get our share. You’re crabbin’ the act somethin’ fierce’s afternoon. Step on it!”
Sally made a valiant effort to obey, but her crystal-gazing that afternoon was not a riotous success. She made one or two bad blunders, the worst of which caused a near-panic.
For she was so absorbed in her own disappointment and in contemplating the effect of her news upon David, when she should tell him that she was an illegitimate child of a woman who had abandoned her, that her eyes and intuition were not so keen as they had been.
Although there had been a sharp-faced shrew of a wife clinging to his arm before he vaulted upon the platform for a “reading,” she mechanically told a meek little middle-aged man that he was in love with a “zo beau-ti-ful girl wiz golden hair” and that he would “marry wiz her.”
After the poor husband had been snatched from the platform by his furiously jealous wife and given a most undignified paddling with her hastily removed shoe—an “added attraction” which proved vastly entertaining to the carnival crowd but which caused a good many quarters to find their hasty way back into handbags and trouser pockets—Sally felt her failure so keenly that she leaned backward in an effort to be cautious.
“For God’s sake, kid, snap out of it before the next show!” Gus pleaded, mopping his dripping brow with a huge purple-bordered white silk handkerchief. “I’m part owner of this tent, you know, and you’re hittin’ me where I live. Come on, ’at’s a good girl! Forget it—whatever’s eatin’ on you! This ain’t a half-bad world—not a-tall! What if that sheik of yours is trailin’ Nita around? Reckon he’s just after her grouch bag—”
“Her—grouch bag?” Sally seized upon the unfamiliar phrase in order to put off as long as possible full realization of the heart-stopping news he was giving her so casually.