Girl Alone

The terror which the menace of violent death had held for her now seemed a pallid, weak thing, beside the heart-stopping emotion which the New Yorker's mocking, amused voice utt...

Hours more of "crystal-gazing," of giving lavish promises of "long journeys," success, wealth, sweethearts, husbands, wives, bumper corn and wheat crops, babies--until eleven o'...

The long, bare room had never been graced by a picture or a curtain. Its only furniture was twenty narrow iron cots. Four girls were scrubbing the warped, wide-planked floor, th...

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 dre...

Nothing, no one could have held her. The words had scarcely lift the butler's lips when Sally reached David's side, her full skirt, lengthened to the tips of her slippers by the...

"Come out of that corn!" A loud, harsh voice cut across David's low-spoken speech, made them spring guiltily apart. "I ain't going to stand for no such goings-on on my farm!"

A little later, when Sally was seated primly beside Clem Carson, jolting rapidly down the road that led past the orphanage toward the business district of the city, the farmer n...

During the two hours that they waited for the Reverend Mr. Greer, "the marrying parson," David and Sally sat stiffly side by side on a horsehair sofa, only their fingers touchin...

At 11 o'clock that Saturday night Sally Ford blew out the flame in the small kerosene lamp--the electric light wires had not been brought to the garret--and then knelt beside th...

It was a desolately unhappy Sally who began what she considered the unbearable task of living those two years which Courtney Barr had decreed should separate the orphan, Sally F...

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 rig...

"It's not fair! You look as fresh as a daisy! And I've been frantic with anxiety all day, expecting to hear that Princess Lalla had sickened with pneumonia. I've come to collect...

It was a sad, listless little "Princess Lalla" who cupped tiny brown hands about a crystal ball and pretended to read "past, present and future" in its mysterious depths as the...

When Sally was awakened soon after dawn the next morning--Wednesday--by the shouts and songs of the "white hopes" unloading the carnival on the outskirts of the Capital City, th...

They could see him, a small figure from that distance, looking like a Jack-in-the-box as he waved his arms and thundered the dear, familiar phrases which Sally would never forge...

Sunday, on the show train, was a happy day, the happiest that Sally had ever known in her life. Freaks and dancers, barkers and concessionaires, all the members of that weirdly...

Somehow she made her way home, crept painfully, like a mortally wounded animal, up the circular staircase to her room. Bracing her shaking hands on her dressing table, she stare...

Enid Barr left with her daughter for Kansas City that night, after wiring her husband, Courtney Barr, who was still awaiting word from her in Capital City. For two days Sally an...

The night was eerie with voices from unseen bodies, or bodies half-revealed in the flare of gasoline torches, as the business of loading the carnival proceeded. Soft, rich voice...