She could have sent word to David by Gus or Pop Bybee that she had given up her frantic plan to run away; that he need not meet her in the darkness of the pulsing, hot June night. But—she had not—
It came then—clear and true, the whistled notes of the song which her heart sang to David—“I’ll be loving you—always!”
She edged over the side of the berth, the toe of her slipper groping until it found the edge of the lower berth in which the midget was sleeping. When she was safe in the aisle she cast a fearful glance up and down the car, and noted with uneasy surprise that Nita’s berth, directly opposite the midget’s, was still unoccupied, the green curtains spread wide so that the grayish-white blur of the sheet and pillow was plainly discernible in the faint light from the one electric globe over the door.
But she had no time now to worry about Nita or Nita’s threats. David was awaiting her—with the song still humming its sweet, extravagant promise in his heart. Or—was it? Had he chosen the song idly? Had he meant anything by that teasing kiss on the tip of her nose, by his “Dear little Sally!”
“Being in love hurts something terrible,” Sally shook her head at her own turbulent emotions, unconsciously employing the homely language of the orphanage. “But even if he doesn’t love me I’m glad I love him. David, David!”
CHAPTER VIII
The night was eerie with voices from unseen bodies, or bodies half-revealed in the flare of gasoline torches, as the business of loading the carnival proceeded. Soft, rich voices from black men’s throats blended with the velvety softness of the late-June night:
“Oh, if Ah had wings like an angel,
Over these prison walls Ah would fly!
Ah would fly to the ahms of my poah dahlin’,
An’ theah Ah’d be willin’ to die.”
A lonesome, heart-breaking plaint. Sally shivered. Except for David and Pop Bybee and Dan, the barker, she and David might have been behind prison bars tonight, learning the shame and misery that had created that song.
A white roustabout said something evil to her out of the corner of his mouth as she brushed past him on her way to join David. But she scarcely noticed, for there was David, his shoulders looming immensely broad in the dark coat he had donned in her honor. Her hands were out to him before he had reached her, and when he took them both and laid them softly against his breast, so that her leaping blood caught the rhythm of his strongly beating heart, she could scarcely restrain herself from raising her small body on tip-toe and lifting her face for his kiss.