Perhaps he doubted that the Ferris Wheel was exempt from the vicissitudes of the wheel of fortune, for, shortly after the conclusion of supper, he hurried them out upon the verandah, saying that the wind was rising and he would not risk them on the machine if its force should increase.
CHAPTER XI
Clotilda Pinnott had not been very definitely sensitive to the dull disfavour with which the public had received hitherto her song-and-dance. In her own mind she accorded it scarcely more appreciation. She perceived, of course, that the other artists enjoyed a boisterous enthusiasm of applause, the snake-eater, the winged lady, the high diver, and their confrères, but their meed of praise seemed but just, since the merits of their respective turns were so great in her primitive estimation. Singing and dancing in her rustic garb were but everyday matters, and she sustained no great mortification that her turn should be regarded with scant interest. She had not lost her relish for the performance, however; the praise that Lloyd accorded it was sweet in her ears, though she secretly thought him a fool to care for such folly. It brought him near to her the only moments in the day when he had been accessible. And this had been both a surprise and a grief; she could only see him at a distance, coming and going, absorbed with a thousand anxious details, she knew not what, nor wherefore; she had fancied that at the street fair he would be continually at her side, for the love of the beauty of that face and form he extolled so enthusiastically, that joy in the endowment of voice and motion he had found so poetic. Only a few moments before the turn did he appear, stepping lightly on the stage behind the drawn curtain, his hat on the back of his head, his face, of which she dimly appreciated the beauty of contour and chiselling, hot and moist, flushed and a bit anxious; giving a word of direction here and there to the "supes," charged with the management of the simple scene; critically surveying her as she stood ready for the rising of the curtain. He always spoke gently to her; she vaguely realised that he was sharply disappointed by the public reception of the attraction, and that he sympathised with her in the downfall of her presumable hopes. She cared for naught else, when his eyes kindled as he surveyed her in the rising glow of the lime light.
"You're a peach!" he would exclaim, "and don't you forget it! The fools out there don't know their heads from a hole in the ground!"
The joy of his approbation surged through her whole being as she looked shyly at him while he stood at gaze, his hands in his pockets, and his hat on the back of his head. Her cheeks blazed under the rouge, laid on for the broad effects of the lime-light; her eyes shone with a radiance that embellished and vitalised her youthful beauty; she trembled from head to foot in a quiver of humble adoration, of gratified vanity, of the ecstasy of loving and believing herself beloved. Once he noticed her agitation.
"I thought you were going to pull through without a touch of stage fright," he said casually. "Don't think of the house—soon over."
"Reg'lar buck ager," Tom Pinnott remarked. One or another, sometimes several of the Pinnott men made a point of being present at the performance, and there were persons at the street fair unsophisticated enough to believe that it was the discovery of the Thespian genius in their household, and their pride and solicitude in her achievements, that had brought the Pinnott family as a unit down from their mountain fastnesses to attend the fair. But these credulous wights hailed from the furthest coves, and had never indeed heard that whisky could be procured by any means save by placing in a designated hollow tree a jug, with a half dollar mortised into a corn-cob stopper, and after an interval returning to find the money absorbed and the jug gurgling with tipsy delight. That the ardent could be found in a store or a saloon, or dispensed at a lunch stand was an idea that, unassisted, could never have entered their minds.
"Fust time," continued Tom Pinnott vivaciously, "I ever tuk sight at a buck running on a deer path, by a stand, my finger shuk so on the trigger, an' my aim war so contrarious that the bullet glanced out to the middle of the ruver, an' the beastis war humpin' hisself along so fast that he beat it thar, an' it tuk him right a-hint the ear, and killed him. Left ear, 'twar."
"Skiddoo!" said Lloyd, laughing slightly at this veracious chronicle. "Clear the stage! The public is too well used to liars to want to hear you. Now, Heart's Delight! listen for the orchestra, and mind you go on at the third beat of the fourth measure, or you'll get thrown out. Count! Count!"
On this immemorial day, when in the storm of applause that thundered upon her disappearance and clamoured for her return, she stood in the little nook that served as wings, stunned, stolidly surprised, overwhelmed, forgetful of all she had been taught to observe for this contingency, she did not shiver, nor tremble, nor sob half hysterically, till he found her there.