When the last stragglers of the carnival crowd had been ushered rather unceremoniously from the tent, Sally rose from her chair and pattered swiftly to where Gus, the barker, stood talking with Pop Bybee, owner and manager of Bybee’s Bigger and Better Carnival.
“Thank you, Gus! I was scared nearly to death! It was wonderful the way you stalled along till those two rubes—” she was already becoming familiar with carnival lingo—“got into a fight. Wasn’t it lucky for me they did?” she added naively.
“Hell, kid!” Gus grinned at her and tilted his derby more rakishly over his left eye. “It was a frame-up. Them’s our boys. The guy that pretended to have his pocket picked will swear he made a mistake, and the worst old Sam can do is to have ’em fined for disorderly conduct. I’ll square it with ’em, and they’ll be in Capital City by show-time tomorrow.”
Pop Bybee chuckled richly, his bright, pale-blue eyes gleaming in the lobster-red expanse of his old face. “Didn’t I tell you, child, that the law couldn’t touch you long as you stuck with the carnival? Dave tells me you’re babbling about running away again because we’re hitting the trail for your home town tonight. You stick, Sally. Pop Bybee and Gus and the rest of us will take care of you.”
Sally’s lips parted to tell him of Nita’s threat if she did not relinquish her claim upon David’s love and friendship, but before the first word tumbled out, the old inhibition against tattling, taught her in the stern school of life in an orphanage, restrained her.
“You’re all so good to me,” she choked, then turned abruptly away to where “Pitty Sing,” the midget, was impatiently awaiting her human sedan-chair.
“I don’t want to influence you unduly,” the midget piped in her prim, high little voice, “but Mr. Bybee and Gus are right. You are safer with the carnival than anywhere else in the state, and if you ran away I should be very sorry. I like you, Sally. I like you very much.”
The dress tent was taken down by the “white hopes” almost before the women performers had had time to change from show clothes to nightgowns and kimonos. By twelve o’clock the lot was as bare of tents and booths and ferris wheels and motordromes and “whips” and merry-go-rounds as if those mechanical symbols of joy and fun had never existed.
And Sally lay on the lumpy, smelly mattress of her upper berth in the ancient Pullman car, waiting for her David’s whistled signal—a bar of “Always.” She was fully dressed.
Her heart sang the words—“I’ll be loving you—always! Not for just an hour, not for just a day, not for just a year, but—always!”