When they had gone the midget yanked the green curtains together with comical fierceness, then crawled under the top of the sheet that covered Sally.
"I'm going to sleep here with you, Sally," she said. "I don't take up much room."
And the woman who was old enough to be Sally's mother curled her 29-inch body in the curve of Sally's right arm and laid her tiny cheek, as soft and wrinkled as a worn kid glove, in the hollow of Sally's firm young neck.
But long after the midget was asleep, Sally lay wide-eyed and tense in the dark, her mind a welter of fears and love and doubt. She had pleaded passionately with Pop Bybee for David, fiercely shoving to the dark depths of her mind even the memory of the jealousy which Nita had fiendishly aroused in her heart. But now that she had saved him temporarily by convincing Bybee that the boy could not have taken part in the robbery, doubt began to insinuate its ugly body upward from those dark depths where she had buried it.
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.
Had he been only sorry for her, glad of an opportunity to "blow," to get out of the state where he was wanted on two serious charges? Was he dismayed, too, by the fact that moonlight had tricked him into telling her that he loved her, thus adding the responsibility of her future to the burden of protecting her in this hectic present?
Then a sweeter, saner memory clamored for attention. She heard again his fond, husky voice caressing her, his "Dear little Sally!" And involuntarily her mouth pursed in memory of his kiss, that kiss that had left her giddy with delight.
How unfailingly kind and sweet he had been since that first day, when he had strode into her life, with the sun on his chestnut hair and the glory of the sun in his eyes. He had not failed her once, but she was failing him now, by doubting him, by picturing him as a fugitive in the dark, fleeing with a pair of criminals who had robbed the man whose kindness had protected him from the law.