Anne Austin

“ I want to serve it. But, oh, Sally, let’s not torture ourselves any more. I know I mustn’t marry you under this cloud, but let’s be happy for a few minutes before we go back to the show train. No, don’t, darling!” as she lifted her arms. “Just sit there on my coat and let me look at you. You’re the most beautiful thing in the world. Lovely Sally!”
They sat side by side, hands not touching but hearts reaching toward each other, and the minutes slipped silently away as David drank in her moon-silvered young beauty, and she fed her love-hunger upon his Viking-like handsomeness and strength. ”

“ CHAPTER FIVE
"Shame on you, Bonnie Dundee!" cried Penny Crain, her small fists clenched belligerently. "'Death hand', indeed! You talk like a New York tabloid! And if you don't realize that all of us have stood pretty nearly as much as we can without having to play the hand at bridge—the very hand we played while Nita Selim was being murdered!—then you haven't the decency and human feelings I've credited you with!" ”

“ As the miles sped away Carson seemed to feel the need of impressing upon her the fact that her summer was not to be one of unalloyed pleasure. He sketched the life of the farm, her own work upon it, as if to prepare her for the worst. “My wife’s got the reputation of being a hard woman,” he told her confidentially. “But she’s a good woman, good clean through. She works her fingers to the bone, and she can’t abide a lazy, trifling girl around the place. You work hard, Sally, and speak nice and respectful-like, and you two’ll get on, I warrant.” ”

“ Dundee said deliberately. "For your wife is already dead!" Then his clear words rang out like the knell of doom:
"Tracey Arthur Miles, I arrest you for the murder of your wife, known as Juanita Leigh Selim, and for the murder of Dexter Sprague. And it is my duty to warn you that anything you say may be used against you."
Tracey Miles lifted his ashen face and stared at the detective blankly, as though he had gone deaf and blind. "All—over—isn't it? May I—have a—drink?" he managed to articulate at last. ”

“ The last week, except for the storm, had been an excellent one; money was free, spirits high. Even Mrs. Bybee, hovering like a mother hen over David, was good-natured, inclined to reminisce and give advice. Sally, whose talent for exquisite darning had been discovered by the women and girls, sat on the edge of David’s berth, her lap full of flesh and beige and gun metal silk stockings, her needle flying busily, her lips curved with a smile of pure delight, as she listened to the surge of laughter and song and talk. ”

“ Dundee did not bother to tell her how well he knew she was lying, for suddenly something knocked on the door of his mind. He strode to the closet, searched for a moment among the multitude of garments hanging there, then emerged with the brown silk summer coat which Nita Selim had worn to Breakaway Inn that noon. Before the terrified woman's eyes he thrust a hand first into one deep pocket and then another, finding nothing except a handkerchief of fine embroidered linen and a pair of brown suede gauntlet gloves. ”

“ And the breeze rustled through them, bringing to the beauty-drunk little girl a cargo of mingled odors of earth, ripe fruit and greenness thrusting up from the moist embrace of the ground to the kiss of the sun.
“Let’s sit here on the ground and watch the moon come up,” David suggested, his voice hushed with the wonder of the night and of the beauty that lay about them. “The earth is soft, and dry from the sun. It won’t soil your pretty dress.”
Sally obeyed, locking her slender knees with her hands and resting her chin upon them. ”

“ It suddenly occurred to me, while you were spinning your foolish theory, how flattered Tracey would have been if Flora had confessed to him Saturday night that she had killed Nita because she was jealous!"
"Which was not my theory, if you remember!" Dundee retorted. "But why is the idea so amusing? Deep in his heart, I suppose any man would really be a bit flattered if his wife loved him enough to be that jealous."
"You don't know Tracey Miles as well as I do," Penny assured him, her eyes still mirthful. ”

“ Whoever my mother was she was ashamed I’d been born, she paid Mrs. Ford to take me away when I was an infant, away from New York, so—so I wouldn’t disgrace her. I’m the ugly name Nita called me today. I’m—I’m—”
“You’re my Sally,” David said gently, his arms gathering her in, holding her comfortingly against his breast, in a passionless embrace of utter tenderness. “Do you think I would let that make any difference at all? If anything could, it would make me love you more. But I love you now with every bit of me. And we’ll be married, Sally. What do I care about being a scientific farmer?” ”

“ That the big lamp, when he, following Strawn, had first examined the scene of Nita's murder, had not stood in front of the window frame, did not dampen Dundee's excitement in the least. After Karen Marshall's scream that room had been filled with excited people, who had rushed about, looking out of the window for the murderer and doing all the other things which terror-stricken people do in such a crisis. No, the murderer—or murderess—had found no difficulty in shifting the big lamp one foot nearer the chaise longue, to the place it had always occupied before. ”

“ Sally reflected sadly, dusting around nutmeg over the thickly sugared apples, “if I could stay on here, Mrs. Carson would want to adopt me. But of course Pearl and Mr. Carson wouldn’t let her. They hate me because David likes me and won’t marry Pearl. And I like David better than anybody in the world,” she confessed to herself, as the pink in her cheeks deepened. “But I would love to have a mother, even if it was only a ready-made mother. I wonder why some girls have everything, and others nothing? Why should Pearl have a mother who just spoils her past all enduring? ”

“ Regardless of the ensuing hubbub Dundee strode into the dining room, where Tracey Miles stood at the sideboard, pouring whiskey from an almost empty decanter into a small glass.
"May I drink the Scotch Tracey has poured for me, Mr. Dundee?" Mrs. Dunlap asked shakily, leaning against the big round table.
"Yes, but—Silence, please!" he cried, as there came the first faint, tinkling notes of Juanita, from Nita's musical powder box, penetrating the thin wall between the bedroom and dining room. ”

“ Carnival routine had already become an old story to Sally; she no longer minded the curious stares of villagers, the crude advances of dressed-up young male “rubes.” The glamor had worn off, but in its place had come a deep contentment and a sympathetic understanding, born on that happy Sunday when the relaxed carnival family had shown her its heart and hopes. She was glad to be one of them, to be earning her living by giving entertainment and happiness—fake though her crystal-gazing was—to thousands of people whose lives were blighted with monotony. ”

“ You've got the damnedest way of making a chap tell everything he would cut his tongue out rather than spill, Dundee! But just because a young man's in love, and happens not to show up at a party, is no reason to think he sneaked up to the house and killed the woman he loved and wanted to marry. For I'm not so dumb that I haven't seen the drift of your damnable questions, Dundee!... Do you know Ralph Hammond, by any chance? ”

“ Hope you have a good time!”
“Goodby, Sal-lee! Write me a letter, Sal-lee!” “Goodby, goodby!”
Sally, waving her Sunday handkerchief, craned her neck for a last sight of those blue-and-white-ginghamed little girls, the only playmates and friends she had in the world. There were tears in her eyes, and, queerly, for she thought she hated the Home, a stab of homesickness shooting through her heart. How safe they were, there in the playground pen! How simple and sheltered life was in the Home, after all! Suddenly she knew, somehow, that it was the last time she would ever see it, or the children. ”

“ Enid Barr laughed, but a bright flush of pleasure spread over her fair face. “One has to do something with ‘much moneys,’ doesn’t one? Listen, Princess Lalla, if that is really your name: prove to me you are a real crystal-gazer! Tell me something I’d give almost anything to know—” She leaned forward tensely, her violet-blue eyes darkening with excitement and appeal until they were almost the color of Sally’s.
“And what’s that, Enid?” a mocking, amused voice inquired. “Do you want to know whether I really love you? How can you ask! Of course I do!” ”

“ But really, Sally Ford—” his voice dropped caressingly on the name, as if to remind her that he shared her secret with her—“the way you persist in misunderstanding me is very distressing.
“I’m not mocking you, my dear child! I’m mocking myself—if anyone. It recurs to me continually that this is an amazing adventure that Arthur Van Horne, of New York, Long Island and Newport is so sedulously engaged upon! To paraphrase your own delightful defense, I’m really ‘not that kind of man.’ I assure you I’m not in the habit of making love to show girls, no matter how adorable their mouths may be!” ”

“ Did he really love her—a pathetic, immature girl from an orphanage, a girl who had been nothing but a responsibility and a source of dire trouble to him since he had first met and championed her on the Carson farm?
Her old feeling of inferiority rose like nausea in her throat. Life in an orphanage is not calculated to give a girl faith in her own beauty and charm. No one, until David’s teasing eyes had rested on her, had thought her beautiful. ”

“ Sally flushed angrily and struggled to rise, but David held her back. “You’ll have to go with her, darling. Remember how you’ve always wanted a mother? You have one now, and she wants you with her, wants to make up to you for all you’ve missed.”
As only mute rebellion answered him, he wisely changed his tactics: “Do you think you could ever be really happy, darling, knowing that you had hurt your mother, cheated her of the child for whom she has grieved all these years? She’ll never have another child, Sally, and she needs you as much as you need her.” ”

“ She would never forgive us, Sally, if I took you away and made you live on what I can earn as a farmer, and she would be right not to forgive. I would not forgive myself, and after awhile you’d be unhappy, too, remembering all that you had lost, including a mother who adores you. Goodby, Sally. David.”
She was so quiet, so white at supper that Grant Proctor, who was already in love with her, begged her to let him give her a drink from his pocket flask, but she refused, scarcely knowing what he had said to her. Once she caught her mother’s eyes, and shivered at the anxiety and reproach in them. ”

“ Ross Willis thanked “Princess Lalla” awkwardly and dropped from the platform to the grass-stubbled ground, entirely unaware that the marvelous seeress was little Sally Ford.
Confidence and mirth welled up in Sally. She began to believe in herself as “Princess Lalla,” just as she had always more than half-believed that she was the queen or the actress whom she had impersonated in the old days so recently ended forever, when she had “play-acted” for the other orphans. ”

“ Pop Bybee wants us all in the privilege car,” a carnival employe shouted, running down the sleeping car and pausing only to thrust a hand into each berth, like a Pullman porter awakening its passengers.
But Sally was already dressing, getting her dress on backward and sobbing with futile rage at the time lost in reversing it. When she was scrambling out of her upper berth, a tiny hand reached out of the lower and tugged at her foot.
“Don’t forget me, Sally,” the midget commanded sharply. “And for heaven’s sake, don’t take on so! You’ll make yourself sick, crying like that. ”

“ I think it has made it harder for me to find that underneath the new surface you are still Sally Ford. But they’ll change the core of you almost as rapidly as they have remade the surface of you into a society beauty. And after you’re changed all through you’ll be glad I went away. I’ll carry my own Sally in my heart always, and the new Sally Barr will fall in love with the splendid young son of some old family, marry him and make her mother very happy. ”

“ And Sally squirmed miserably, pitifully afraid that she would never measure up to the standard which her mother and Courtney Barr had set for her, knowing, too, deep in her heart, that she did not want to. For her heart had been given to a golden young god of a man, whose kingdom was the soil, and whose wife needed none of the qualities which Enid Barr was bent upon cultivating in her daughter. ”

“ At least there were no references to the case in either Wednesday’s or Thursday’s papers, and Sally’s heart was light with gratitude to David and Pop Bybee for having persuaded her to stick with the carnival. It was rather fun to be on exhibition, reading the fortunes of the very policemen who had been given her description and orders to “get” her—much more fun than fleeing along state roads at night and hiding in cornfields by day, hungry, exhausted, afraid of her shadow and of the more menacing shadow of the state reformatory. ”

“ So far had her imagination run away with her!
It was the last evening of the carnival in Stanton, and money rolled into the pockets of the concessionaires and the showmen.
“Last chance to see the tallest man on earth and the littlest woman! Last chance, folks!”
It was already a little old to Sally—the spieler’s ballyhoo. She could have repeated it herself. Glamor was fading from the carnival. The dancing girls were not young and beautiful, as they had seemed at first; they had never danced on Broadway in Ziegfeld’s Follies; they never would. ”

“ It was absurd to think that a woman of such wealth and beauty, whose philanthropy had undoubtedly been a gesture of boredom, was seriously interested in one lone little girl who had run away from charity.
It did not even seem odd to Sally that Enid Barr should have paid a second visit to the carnival. Probably Capital City afforded scant amusement for a woman of her sophistication, and the carnival, crude and tawdry though it was, was better than nothing. ”

“ Children screamed; women shrilled for help, called frantically for their offspring separated from them in that mad rush for the exits.
Sally had almost won to the alley exit when she remembered “Pitty Sing,” the midget, tiny, helpless Miss Tanner, who was paying her to carry her to and from the tent, who must even now be cowering in her baby-chair, unable even to reach the ground without assistance.
It was not quite so hard to push her way back into the center of the tent; crazed men and women offered little resistance to anyone who was so foolish as to tempt death under a collapsed tent. ”

“ And please make Pearl not hate me so much just because David is sweet to me. She has so many friends and a father and mother and a grandmother and a nice home and so many pretty clothes, while I haven’t anything. Make her feel kinder toward me, dear God, and I’ll work so hard and be so good! And please, God, keep my heart and body pure, like Mrs. Stone says.”
Lying in bed, covered only with the scant nightgown she had brought from the orphanage, Sally did not feel the oppressive heat nor the hardness and lumpiness of her cornshuck mattress. ”