An enormous poster, pasted upon a billboard, showed a nine-foot giant and a 30-inch dwarf, the little man smoking a huge cigar, seated cockily in the palm of the giant’s vast hand. Big red type below the picture announced: “Bybee’s Bigger and Better Show—Stanton, June 9 and 10. One hundred performers, largest menagerie in any carnival on the road today.” “I suppose they’re going to spend Sunday here,” David remarked. Then he turned toward Sally, beheld the miracle of her transformed face. “Why, child, you want to go to the carnival, don’t you? Poor little Sally!” His voice was so tender, so whimsical, so sympathetic, that tears filmed over the brilliance of her sapphire eyes. “I went to a circus once,” she said with the eager breathlessness of a child. “The governor—he was running for office again—sent tickets for all the orphans. And, oh it was wonderful, David! We all planned to run away from the orphanage and join the circus. We talked about it for weeks, but—we didn’t run away. The girls didn’t, I mean, but one of the big boys at the orphanage did and Ruby Presser, the girl he was sweet on, got a postcard from him from New York when the circus was in winter quarters. His name was Eddie Cobb and—oh, the train’s stopping, David! Look!” “Yes.” David shaded his eyes and squinted down the railroad track. “This is a spur of the main road, a siding, they call it. I suppose the carnival cars will stay here today—” But for once Sally was not listening to him. She was running toward the cars, from which the engine had been uncoupled, and as she ran she called shrilly, joyously, to a young man who had dropped catlike from the top of a car to the ground: “Eddie! Eddie Cobb! Eddie!” CHAPTER V To Sally it was all like a dream, a fantastic, lovely dream—except that in dreams you are never permitted to eat the feast that your hunger makes so real. And not even in a dream could she have imagined anything so good as the thick, furry, dark-brown buckwheat cakes, plastered with golden butter and swimming in maple syrup. And Eddie Cobb’s voice seemed real enough, although the things he was telling her and David in the hastily erected cook tent certainly had dream-like qualities. And David, sighing with satisfaction over his third plateful of hot cakes, was gloriously real. So was the long, rough-pine counter at which they ate, and behind which the big negro cook sang songs as he worked before a huge smoky oil stove. Tables scattered throughout the tent and covered with worn oilcloth reminded her of the refectory of the orphanage which now seemed so far away in the past of her childhood. She drew her wondering eyes from their exploration of the cook tent, focussed them on Eddie Cobb’s freckled, good-natured face, listened to what he was telling them: