By nine o’clock of that evening snow lay deep in the streets and the weather had become bitter cold.  It was difficult to walk about.  The stores were dark and the people had crawled away to their houses.  The evening train from Cleveland was very late but nobody was interested in its arrival.  By ten o’clock all but four of the eighteen hundred citizens of the town were in bed.

Hop Higgins, the night watchman, was partially awake.  He was lame and carried a heavy stick.  On dark nights he carried a lantern.  Between nine and ten o’clock he went his rounds.  Up and down Main Street he stumbled through the drifts trying the doors of the stores.  Then he went into alleyways and tried the back doors.  Finding all tight he hurried around the corner to the New Willard House and beat on the door.  Through the rest of the night he intended to stay by the stove.  “You go to bed.  I’ll keep the stove going,” he said to the boy who slept on a cot in the hotel office.

Hop Higgins sat down by the stove and took off his shoes.  When the boy had gone to sleep he began to think of his own affairs.  He intended to paint his house in the spring and sat by the stove calculating the cost of paint and labor.  That led him into other calculations.  The night watchman was sixty years old and wanted to retire.  He had been a soldier in the Civil War and drew a small pension.  He hoped to find some new method of making a living and aspired to become a professional breeder of ferrets.  Already he had four of the strangely shaped savage little creatures, that are used by sportsmen in the pursuit of rabbits, in the cellar of his house.  “Now I have one male and three females,” he mused.  “If I am lucky by spring I shall have twelve or fifteen.  In another year I shall be able to begin advertising ferrets for sale in the sporting papers.”

The nightwatchman settled into his chair and his mind became a blank.  He did not sleep.  By years of practice he had trained himself to sit for hours through the long nights neither asleep nor awake.  In the morning he was almost as refreshed as though he had slept.

With Hop Higgins safely stowed away in the chair behind the stove only three people were awake in Winesburg.  George Willard was in the office of the Eagle pretending to be at work on the writing of a story but in reality continuing the mood of the morning by the fire in the wood.  In the bell tower of the Presbyterian Church the Reverend Curtis Hartman was sitting in the darkness preparing himself for a revelation from God, and Kate Swift, the school teacher, was leaving her house for a walk in the storm.

It was past ten o’clock when Kate Swift set out and the walk was unpremeditated.  It was as though the man and the boy, by thinking of her, had driven her forth into the wintry streets.  Aunt Elizabeth Swift had gone to the county seat concerning some business in connection with mortgages in which she had money invested and would not be back until the next day.  By a huge stove, called a base burner, in the living room of the house sat the daughter reading a book.  Suddenly she sprang to her feet and, snatching a cloak from a rack by the front door, ran out of the house.