If only David could pass that cordon successfully! Probably he had gone to the carnival grounds. But Pop Bybee, true to his promise to protect the boy, had decreed that he should become private chef and waiter to himself and Mrs. Bybee, remaining cooped up all day in the privilege car of the show train.
Poor David! Dear David! Her heart ached passionately for his loneliness, for his magnificent body caged in a hot box of a kitchen, when it had been so gloriously free in fragrant, sun-kissed fields before she had met him.
Why, he might almost as well be in jail! And he had done nothing but protect a girl alone in the world from the cruel revenge of a man who had promised the state to treat her as his own daughter.
But even though her heart throbbed with pain for David she could not be wholly sad, for he loved her, wanted to marry her, would even now be married to her if she had let him give up his ambitions for her.
By the time she had finished breakfast in the cook tent the carnival was nearly ready for business. Even the Ferris wheel’s glittering immensity was flung toward the sky, the basket seats hanging motionless in the still, hot air. Banners advertising real and spurious wonders were being tacked upon scarred booths, endowing them with glamor: “Bybee’s Follies Girls—a dazzlingly beautiful chorus straight from Ziegfeld’s Follies in New York—Six reasons why men leave home”; “Beautiful Babe, the Fattest Girl in the World! 620 pounds of rosy, cuddly girl flesh”; “The Palace of Wonders—Greatest Aggregation of Freaks in the World; also Princess Lalla, from Constantinople, crystal-gazer, escaped member of the Sultan’s Harem; Sees all, knows all—Past, Present and Future!”
Sally wandered along the midway, waving a small brown hand to Eddie Cobb, who was setting up his gambling wheel and gaudily dressed Kewpie dolls; exchanged predictions as to the day’s business with two or three good-natured concessionaires; won a gold-toothed smile from the henna-haired girl who sold tickets for the tin rabbit races.
But she soon discovered that she was restless and lonely. The carnival had no glamor in these early hours. Without the crowds there was no glamor; the crowds themselves, though they did not suspect it, furnished the glamor with their naive credulity, their laughter, their free and easy spending, their susceptibility as a relief from the monotony of their lives, to the very spirit of carnival for which this draggled old hoyden of a show was named.
“The kids would love it,” Sally remembered suddenly, seeing in a painfully bright flash of memory the oldish, wistful little faces of Betsy and Thelma and Clara and all the other orphans who had until so recently—though it seemed years ago—been her only friends and playmates.
“I wonder if Eloise Durant is terribly unhappy, or if she has found some other ‘big girl’ to pet her. I wonder if Betsy and Thelma and Clara miss my play-acting.”
She smiled at the picture of herself draped in a sheet and crowned with her own braids:—an ermine cloak and a crown of gold adorning a queen! “If they could see me now! Play-acting all the time, all dressed up in purple satin trousers and a green satin jacket all glittery with gold braid! I wish I had lots of money, so I could send them all tickets to come to the carnival,” her thoughts ran on, as homesickness for the place she had hoped never to see again rose up, treacherous and unwelcome, to dim her joy in the glorious miracle of David’s love.