Number 18 Cottonwood Avenue was brilliantly lighted.  Girlie was playing the piano, Babe’s voice, “sassing Poppa,” was audible from one end to the other of the empty street.  Her laughter slapped the air.  Dickie hesitated.  He was afraid of them all—­of Sylvester’s pensive, small, brown eyes and hard, long hands, of Babe’s bodily vigor, of Girlie’s mild contemptuous look, of his mother’s gloomy, furtive tenderness.  Dickie felt a sort of aching and compassionate dread of the rough, awkward caress of her big red hand against his cheek.  As he hesitated, the door opened—­a blaze of light, yellow as old gold, streamed into the blue brilliance of the moon.  It was blotted out and a figure came quickly down the steps.  It had an air of hurry and escape.  A small, slim figure, it came along the path and through the gate; then, after just an instant of hesitation, it turned away from Dickie and sped up the wide street.

Dickie named it at once.  “That’s the girl,” he said; and possessed by his curiosity and by the sense of adventure which whiskey had fortified, he began to walk rapidly in the same direction.  Out there, where the short street ended, began the steep side of a mesa.  The snow on the road that was graded along its front was packed by the runners of freighting sleighs, but it was rough.  He could not believe the girl meant to go for a walk alone.  And yet, would she be out visiting already, she, a stranger?  At the end of the street the small, determined figure did not stop; it went on, a little more slowly, but as decidedly as ever, up the slope.  On the hard, frozen crust, her feet made hardly a sound.  Above the level top of the white hill, the peak that looked remote from Hudson’s yard became immediate.  It seemed to peer—­to lean forward, bright as a silver helmet against the purple sky.  Dickie could see that “the girl” walked with her head tilted back as though she were looking at the sky.  Perhaps it was the sheer beauty of the winter night that had brought her out.  Following slowly up the hill, he felt a sense of nearness, of warmth; his aching, lifelong loneliness was remotely comforted because a girl, skimming ahead of him, had tilted her chin up so that she could see the stars.  She reached the top of the mesa several minutes before he did and disappeared.  She was now, he knew, on the edge of a great plateau, in summer covered with the greenish silver of sagebrush, now an unbroken, glittering expanse.  He stood still to get his breath and listen to the very light crunch of her steps.  He could hear a coyote wailing off there in the foothills, and the rushing noise of the small mountain river that hurled itself down upon Millings, ran through it at frenzied speed, and made for the canon on the other side of the valley.  Below him Millings twinkled with a few sparse lights, and he could, even from here, distinguish the clatter of Babe’s voice.  But when he came to the top, Millings dropped away from the reach of his senses.