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used to be a right well-known stripper in the old days and there were a lot who knew the name then. Not that it's my real one. That's Bertha Hodges. Ugly, isn't it? I dropped it in a hurry. Then I've been married five times and I reckon you could call my last husband's name my legal one. But it was Driggs, and I never liked that, either. Baby LaRue was the name I made for myself, and it's the one I'll stick with."
    "Baby" might be incongruous with her age, but the voice fitted. The woman had the piping voice of a three-year-old. "I live down there in the trailer camp. You know? My next of kin? Something happens to me, you get in touch with Father McConehay at St. Mathias. He's got my burial insurance and my hospitalization. My kin folks— They musta forgotten me long ago." But it was as if she spoke of her first-grade teacher. There was no pathos in her statement. "Usually I entertain when we get together like this."
    Donna had a quick picture of this elderly showwoman doing a strip tease in the hall while all the others who had fled the storm looked on. That would be something to put in her next letter home.
    "I'm pretty good at leadin' singing," Baby chirped on. "An' now an' again I sing an old song myself. One of the real old ones." She winked, comradely fashion.
    It was at that moment that a cracked old voice several notes deeper than Miss LaRue's sang out, "Home, home on the range." Donna could not be sure where it had come from. Not from the old stripper herself for she had been looking into the withered face and there had been no lip movement.
    There was no more of the song, but the question remained in Donna's eye and when there was no answer, she voiced it orally. "What was that, Miss LaRue? A parrot?"
    Miss LaRue had looked more and more guilty as the seconds passed. She ducked her head, dropped two of her bundles and the coat she had not worn, and there was the most ancient and scrubby parrot Donna had ever seen. His almost featherless head was held on one side and he winked at Donna with a leer that tempted her to laugh aloud.
    Now that the worst was known, Baby rushed into speech. "Me an' Toby been together ever since I can remember, seems like. He's like my kin, my nearest of kin. We talk together times when both of us would be lonesome if we didn't have one another. The wind blew over my trailer one year. Toby might have been killed. I just can't leave him there. That's why I was so late getting here. I thought if I got here just before closing time, and after it was raining cats and dogs, you wouldn't make me go back to the trailer and nobody could turn poor old Toby out loose in this weather. You wouldn't, would you?"
    The childlike old face was hardly lowered at all to be on a level with Donna's. Her faded eyes beseeched.
    Donna felt as if she were two people. One knew that she should obey the rules. The other considered the scheming innocence of the old showwoman, and was touched.
    The old woman continued. "I took Toby on tours. Wherever I lived, Toby was there. He's like a mother, or a friend. A woman doesn't have many true friends when she's my age."
    Donna shook her head. "It's against the rules, Miss LaRue. You know it is. No one is allowed to bring pets into the shelter."
    The little woman seemed to grow smaller. "But Toby—I'd just have to go out in all that weather. And that trailer of mine really isn't safe."
    Donna looked at the molted bird. Its bright color had faded. She knew that parrots lived to incredible ages, but by his looks Toby was nearing the end of his allotted span. The old woman was looking at her as if she alone held the key to the gates of paradise.
    "Maybe I could put him in my closet. Then you could come in and feed and talk to him," Donna agreed weakly. "Now you—you're soaked through. What are we going to do about you? You could come down with pneumonia if you sit about in those wet things."
    Nothing could dampen the spirits of the old lady now that Donna had agreed to keep