“Kinda foolish of you, Sally, to pick a fight with that dame. She could-a ruint this pretty face of yours. She’s a bad mama, honey, and you’d better make yourself scarce when she’s around. And say, kid—take a tip from old Gus: no sheik ain’t worth fightin’ for. I been fought over myself considerable in my time, and believe me, while two frails was fightin’ for me I was lookin’ for another one.”
Sally felt shriveled with shame. “I wasn’t fighting her because of—of David,” she muttered, digging the toe of one little red sandal into the dusty grass of the show lot. “Nita called me a—a nasty name. You’d have fought, too!”
“Sure! but not with a dame like Nita, if I was you! You ain’t no match for her. Now, you trot along to the dress tent and rest or cry or say your prayers or anything you want to—except fight!—till show time again. And for God’s sake, don’t turn your back when Nita’s around!”
Sally did not see the Hula dancer again that afternoon, for Nita belonged to the “girlie show,” which had a tent all its own. To encourage her in her confidence as a crystal-gazer, or rather to bolster up the faith of the skeptical audience, which had somehow become wise to the fact that “Princess Lalla” had “pulled some bones,” Gus, the barker, arranged for four or five “schillers”—employes of the carnival, both men and women, dressed to look like members of the audience—to have their fortunes told.
Sally, tipped off by a code signal of Gus’s, let her imagination run riot as she read the magic crystal for the “schillers,” and to everything she told them they nodded their heads or slapped their thighs in high appreciation, loudly proclaiming that “Princess Lalla” was a wow, a witch, the grandest little fortune-teller in the world. Business picked up amazingly; quarters were thrust upon Gus with such speed that he had to form a line of applicants for “past, present and future” upon Sally’s platform.
She did not see David at supper, while she ate in the cook tent after having carried “Pitty Sing,” the midget, to the privilege car. Buck, the negro chef of the privilege car grinned at her, but David was nowhere to be seen. Was he “trailin’ Nita,” as Gus, the barker, had called it? Jealousy laid a hand of pain about her heart, such a sort of pain that she wanted, childishly, to stop and examine it. It claimed instant fellowship in her heart with that other so-new emotion—love. She wanted all afternoon, until Gus had stopped her heart for a beat or two with his casual reference to David and Nita, to fly to David for comfort, to pour out her news to him. She had heard, in anticipation, his softly spoken, tender “Dear little Sally! Don’t mind too much. We have each other.” So far had her imagination run away with her!
It was the last evening of the carnival in Stanton, and money rolled into the pockets of the concessionaires and the showmen.
“Last chance to see the tallest man on earth and the littlest woman! Last chance, folks!”
It was already a little old to Sally—the spieler’s ballyhoo. She could have repeated it herself. Glamor was fading from the carnival. The dancing girls were not young and beautiful, as they had seemed at first; they had never danced on Broadway in Ziegfeld’s Follies; they never would. They were oldish-young women who sneered at the “rubes” and had calluses on the bottoms of their aching feet from dancing on rough board platforms.
Just before the last show Sally wandered out into the midway from the Palace of Wonders, money in her hand which Pop Bybee had advanced to her. But it was lonely “playing the wheels” all by herself, and although Eddie Cobb fixed it so that she won a big Kewpie doll with pink maline skirts and saucy, marcelled red hair, there was little thrill in its possession. When a forlornly weeping little girl stopped her tears to gape covetously at the treasure, Sally gave it up without a pang, and wandered on to the salt water taffy stand, where one of her precious nickels went for a small bag of the tooth-resisting sweet.