Girl Alone Part 19

"Marvelous!" His voice became mockingly hushed and mysterious, as he pretended to gaze into the very heart of the crystal. "I see your whole past boiling away in this magic crystal-slightly flawed, though it is!"

"My past!" she shivered, forgetting that he was faking just as she did.

"You've run away from home, from poverty," he went on in that mocking, too beautiful voice, his black eyes shifting from the crystal to play their insolent, confident fire upon her wide-eyed face. "And you've run away from-a man! Of course," he added lightly, "you'll always be running away from a man-men-every man that looks at you. You're absolutely irresistible, you know, child! But ah, at last you will find him-the man from whom you will not run away! Now, shall I read the future for you?"

"Please, go away. Gus is coming!" Sally pleaded through childishly quivering lips that would have showed ashen-pale if they had not been thickly overlaid with carmine.

"Dear old Gus! I look forward to being pals with Gus, when I give him the pa.s.sword. Now, the future-ah, my dear, what a future! Broadway!

Bright lights! Music! And Princess Lalla in the chorus first, the most adorable little 'pony' of them all! I shall sit in the bald-headed row and toss roses to you, child, and whisper to the eggs next me that 'I knew her when'-when she was a delicious little fake Turkish princess, escaped from the Sultan's harem. And I see a man-let me look closely-a tall, dark man, rather handsome-" and he laughed insolently into her eyes.

"La-dees and gen-tle-men! Right this way, please! I want you all to meet Princess Lalla, from Con-stan-ti-no-ple-"

Gus, the barker, was approaching with long, swift strides, the crowd milling behind him, like sheep following a bellwether.

"I'll finish your future in our next seance." The New Yorker straightened, smiled into her eyes unhurriedly, bowed mockingly, lifted his hat, placed it on his sleek head, retrieved his cane which had been leaning against the crystal stand, and vaulted lightly to the ground.

Gus eyed him menacingly, suspiciously, but beamed when the easterner pressed a bill into his hands and withdrew to the outskirts of the crowd, where he evidently intended to listen to the spieler's introduction of Princess Lalla.

Sally got through her performance somehow, burningly conscious of bold black eyes regarding her admiringly. When she pattered down the steps and along the flattened stubble of the earth floor of the tent on her way to the dress tent to rest between shows, a slim, immaculate figure detached itself from the crowd that was wandering reluctantly toward the exit.

"Cook tent fare must grow rather monotonous," his low, drawling voice stopped her. "I suggest relief-supper with me after the last performance tonight. I am stopping at the governor's mansion, and have the use of one of the official limousines. Credentials enough?" He raised his eyebrows whimsically but his detaining grasp of her arm was not nearly so gentle as his voice.

"No, no!" Sally cried. "I-I'm not that kind of girl! Please let me go-"

"Oh, spirit of H. L. Mencken, hear me!" the New Yorker prayed. "Do girls in the middle west really say that still? I wouldn't have believed it!

'I'm not that kind of girl!'" he repeated, laughing delightedly. "Of course you aren't, darling! No girl ever is! And heaven forbid that I should be the sort of man-fellow, you say out here?-that you evidently believe I am! Now that we understand each other, I again suggest supper, a long, cooling drive in the governor's choicest limousine-the old boy does himself rather well in cars, at the expense of the state-and a continuation of my extremely accurate reading of your future."

"No!" Sally flared, her timidity submerged in anger. "Let me go this minute! I don't like you! I hate you! If you don't turn loose my arm, I'll-I'll scream 'Hey rube'-"

"What a dire threat!" the New Yorker laughed with genuine amus.e.m.e.nt. "Am I the rube? Is that your idea of a taunt so crushing that-"

"It means," Sally said with cold fury, "that every man connected with the carnival will rush into this tent and-and simply tear you to pieces!

It's the S O S signal of the circus and carnival, and it always works!

Now-will you let me go? I swear I'll scream 'Hey, rube!' if you don't-"

"And I had planned such a delicious supper," the New Yorker mourned mockingly as he slowly released her arm, as if reluctant to forego the pleasure that rounded slimness and smoothness gave his highly educated fingers.

Sally cried a little in the dress tent, but she was too angry to give way utterly to tears. The thought which stung her pride most hurtingly was that the New Yorker had seen something bad in her eyes, something of the mother of whose shame she was a living witness.

"But-I guess I showed him!" she told herself fiercely as she dabbed fresh brown powder on her tear-streaked face. "He won't dare bother me again."

But he did dare. He was a nonchalant, smiling, insolent figure, leaning on his cane, as she went through the next performance. She pretended not to see him, but never for a moment, as she well knew, did his cold black eyes waver from their ironic but admiring contemplation of her enchanting little figure in purple satin trousers and green jacket.

And at the late afternoon performance-four o'clock-he was there again, his fine, cruel, humorous mouth smiling at his own folly. She thought of appealing to Gus, the barker, to forbid him admission to the tent, but she knew Gus was too good a business man to heed such a wasteful request. Besides, the barker seemed to like him, or at least to like immensely the bill which invariably pa.s.sed hands when the showman and the glorified "rube" met.

Then suddenly, at ten minutes after four, the New Yorker ceased to have any significance at all to her, at least for the moment. He was wiped out completely in the flood of terror and joy that swept over her brain, making her so dizzy that she leaned against the crystal stand for support.

For tumbling into the tent of the Palace of Wonders came a horde of children, boys and girls, the girls dressed exactly alike in skimpy little white lawn dresses trimmed with five-cent lace, the boys in ugly suits of stiff "jeans."

Her playmates from the orphanage had come to see "Princess Lalla,"

lately Sally Ford, ward of the state and now fugitive from "justice."

CHAPTER X

Sally's first impulse, when she saw the children of the orphanage come tumbling into the Palace of Wonders tent, was to flee. She was so conscious of being Sally Ford, whose rightful place was with those staring, shy little girls in white lawn "Sunday" dresses, that she completely forgot for one moment of pure terror that to them she would merely be "Princess Lalla," favorite crystal-gazer to the Sultan of Turkey before she escaped from his harem.

Cowering low in her high-backed gilded chair, in an effort to make herself as small and inconspicuous as possible-a useless effort really, since she was by far the prettiest and most romantic figure in the tent, dressed as she was in Oriental trappings-she watched the children, whom she knew so well, with a pang of homesickness.

Not that she would want to be back with them! But they were her people, the only chums she had ever known. How well she knew how they felt, liberated for one blessed afternoon from the bleak corridors of the orphanage, catapulted by someone's generosity into fairyland. For to them the carnival was fairyland. These romance-and-beauty-starved orphans saw only glamor and wonder, believed with all their hearts every extravagant word that Gus, the barker, uttered in his stentorian bawl.

Suddenly love and compa.s.sion filled her heart to over-flowing. She wanted to run down the steps that led to her little platform and gather Clara and Thelma and Betsy to her breast. She felt so much older and wiser than she had been two weeks ago, when she had "play-acted" for them as they scrubbed the floor of the dormitory. How awed and admiring they would be if, when their thin little bodies were pressed tight in her arms, she should whisper, "It's me-Sally-play-acting! It's me, kids!" But of course she couldn't do it; she would be betraying not only herself but David, and she would rather die than that David should be caught and punished for defending her against Clem Carson.

As the children milled excitedly in the tent, huddling together in groups like sheep, holding each other's hands, giggling and whispering together as their awed eyes roamed from one "freak" to another, Sally searched their faces hungrily, jealously.

Thelma had cut a deep gash in her cheek; it would leave a scar.

Six-year-old Betsy had a summer cold and no handkerchief; her cheeks were painted poppy-red with fever, or perhaps it was only excitement.

There was a new little girl whom Sally had never seen before, such a homely little runt of a girl, with enormous, hunted eyes and big freckles on her putty-colored cheeks. Her snuff-colored hair had been clipped close to her scalp, so that her poor little round head looked like the jaw of a man who has not shaved for three days.

Clara and Thelma were mothering her, importantly, each holding one of her little claw-hands, and shrilling explanations and information at her.

But where was Mrs. Stone-"old Stone-Face"-herself? Sally knew very well that the children had not come alone.

While Gus was discoursing grandiloquently upon the talents of Boffo, the human ostrich, Sally sat very prim and apparently composed, her watchful eyes veiled by the sc.r.a.p of black lace that reached to the tip of her adorable little nose. Undoubtedly the philanthropist was a man-it was nearly aways a politician courting favor who won it cheaply and impressively by "treating" the orphans to a day at the circus or carnival or to a movie. But if he were present, as the philanthropic politician invariably was, Sally could not find him. That was odd, too, for he was usually the most prominent person at such an affair, taking great pains that no reporters who might happen to be present should overlook him and his great kindness of heart.

Then little old-maidish Miss Pond, sentimental little Miss Pond, who had befriended Sally by telling her all she knew of the child's parentage, came hurrying nervously into the tent. She had undoubtedly been detained at the ticket booth and was sure, judging from her anxious, nervous manner, that the children had gotten into mischief during her brief absence.

Three or four of the little girls ran to cling to her hands, abjectly courting notice as Sally had known they would. But with a few absent-minded pats she shooed them away and bustled anxiously toward a woman whom Sally had not noticed before, so complete had been her absorption in the children.

The woman stood aloof near the platform of "the girl n.o.body can lift,"

listening to Gus, the barker, with a slight, charming smile of amus.e.m.e.nt on her beautiful mouth. When Miss Pond joined her timidly, deferentially, the "lady," as Sally instinctively thought of her from the first moment that she become aware of her, turned slightly, so that "Princess Lalla," whose platform was quite near, got a complete and breath-taking view of her beauty.

"Oh!" Sally breathed ecstatically, her little brown-painted hands clasping each other tightly in her lap. "Oh, you're beautiful! You are like a real princess, or a queen." But she did not say the words aloud.

Behind the little black lace veil her sapphire eyes widened and glowed; her breath came quickly over her parted, carmined lips.

The woman, who seemed scarcely older than a girl but who, by her poise and a certain maturity in her face, gave Sally the impression that she was a queen rather than a princess, had taken her hat off, as if the heat oppressed her. It was a smart, trim little thing of silvery-green felt, that had cupped her small head like the green cup that holds a flower. And her face was the flower, a flower bursting into bloom with the removal of the hat.

Sally had never in all her life seen hair like that-shimmering waves of pure gold, slightly rumpled by the removal of the hat, so that single threads of it caught the light from the gas jet that burned day and night in the rather dark tent. Her skin, pale with the heat of the day, was creamy-white, lineless, smooth and rich, so that Sally's fingers longed to touch it reverently. Surely it could not feel like other flesh; it was made of something finer and rarer than cells and blood, dermis and epidermis.

Her small lovely mouth, soft and full-lipped as a child's, was tender and amused and proud, the mouth of a woman who has always been adored for her beauty but whom adoration has not cheated of very human emotions. Sally wished that she could see the eyes more closely, for even while they were wide and laughing, sending out little sparkles of color and light, she thought there was a hint of sadness in them, of restlessness, as if only a part of her attention was given to the carnival and to the children.

She was very small and slight, shorter even than little Miss Pond, who had to look down as she talked to her. But for all her adorable smallness she carried herself with a certain arrogance. Every movement she made as she and Miss Pond talked together and then joined the children was proud and graceful.

She was wearing a summer sports suit of silvery-green knitted silk, which showed to the best advantage the miniature, Venus proportions of her body. As she swung toward the children, nodding acquiescence to Miss Pond's eager suggestions, little Eloise Durant, the child who had been the "new girl" of Sally's last day in the orphanage, catapulted herself from the huddling ma.s.s of children and impulsively seized her hand. The swift, cordial smile with which she greeted the child and released her hand as quickly as possible kept Sally from resenting the action. But Eloise, still hypersensitive, knew that she had been delicately snubbed and hung back as Gus, the barker, herded the orphans toward Jan the giant's platform.