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 voices from black men's throats blended with the velvety softness of the late-June night:
"Oh, if Ah had wings like an angel, Over these prison walls Ah would fly! Ah would fly to the ahms of my poah dahlin', An' theah Ah'd be willin' to die."
A lonesome, heart-breaking plaint. Sally shivered. Except for David and Pop Bybee and Dan, the barker, she and David might have been behind prison bars tonight, learning the shame and misery that had created that song.
A white roustabout said something evil to her out of the corner of his mouth as she brushed past him on her way to join David. But she scarcely noticed, for there was David, his shoulders looming immensely broad in the dark coat he had donned in her honor. Her hands were out to him before he had reached her, and when he took them both and laid them softly against his breast, so that her leaping blood caught the rhythm of his strongly beating heart, she could scarcely restrain herself from raising her small body on tip-toe and lifting her face for his kiss.
They were shy at first, as they drifted away from the show train across the vacant lot where the carnival had so recently vended trickery and truth, freaks and fakes, color and light and noise and music. They walked softly, slowly, Sally having the absurd feeling that if the grass stubble were tender, tiny flowers, her joy-light feet would not have crushed them. Her fingers were intertwined with David's, and the electric thrill of that contact seemed to be the motor force which propelled her body. Without a word as to direction, they drifted, completely in accord, toward a clump of trees which would some day, when Stanton had become beauty-conscious, form the nucleus of a park.
Sally felt that she was in a spell woven of the beauty and breathlessness of the night and of her inarticulate joy as, still without speaking, David took off his coat and spread it upon the ground that sloped gently from the sturdy trunk of an oak tree. As he was stooping to spread the coat her hand hovered over his head, aching to touch the dear, waving crispness of his hair, yet not daring--quite. But when he straightened more suddenly than she had expected, his head fitted into the cup of her hovering hand before she could snatch it away.