Jan, the giant, was there, sad-eyed but smiling, “Pitty Sing” perched on
one of his shoulders, Noko, the male midget, on the other. “The girl
nobody can lift” was there, too, her right arm in splints; a deep gash
down her pale cheek; Eddie Cobb, who, they told her as they chorused
their welcome, had been crying like a baby as he searched for her
through the wreck of the carnival, was clasping a drenched Kewpie doll
to his breast, apparently the sole survivor of his gambling wheel stock.
Pop and Mrs. Bybee were there, Mrs. Bybee clad only in a black sateen
petticoat and a red sweater. And in spite of his heavy loss from the
fury of the storm Pop was smiling, his bright blue eyes twinkling a
welcome. But—but—Sally’s eyes roved from face to face, confidently at
first, grateful for their friendliness, then widening with alarm. For
David was not there.
“Where’s David?” she cried, then, her voice growing shrill and frantic,
she screamed at them: “Where’s David? Tell me! He’s hurt—dead? Tell me!”
She broke away from Van, ran to Pop Bybee and tugged with her little
blue-white hands washed free of their brown make-up, at his wet coat.
“Reckon he’s safe and sound in the privilege car,” Bybee reassured her,
but his blue eyes avoided hers, pityingly, she thought.
“Was anyone killed in the storm? Tell me!” she insisted, her bluish lips
twisting into a piteous loop of pain.
“We can’t find Nita nowhere,” Babe, the fat girl, blurted out, her eyes
wide with childish love of excitement. “We thought she was buried under
a tent but they’ve got all the tents up now and she ain’t nowhere.”
Nita—and David. Nita—David—missing. For she did not believe for an
instant that Pop Bybee was telling her the truth.
“It seems to me,” Van interrupted nonchalantly, “that dry clothes are
indicated for Princess Lalla. May I escort you to your tent?” and he
bowed with mocking ceremony before her.
“He saved my life,” Sally acknowledged suddenly, half-angrily, for she
resented with childish unreasonableness the fact that it had been this
mocking, insolent stranger, this “rube” from New York, not David, who
had saved her.
An hour later when she was uneasily asleep in her berth in the show
train, whose sleeping cars had been pressed into service in lieu of the
soaked cots in the dress tent, a sudden uproar—hoarse voices shouting
and cursing—shocked her into consciousness. Broken sentences flung out
by angry men, Pop Bybee’s voice easily distinguished among them, told
her what had happened:
“Every damn cent gone!—Pay roll gone!—Safe cracked!—Told you you was a
fool to take in them two hoboes that was already wanted by the police.
That Dave guy’s beat it—made a clean-up—”
“Everybody tumble out! 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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