Hidden Creek | Page 8

beyond
earthly barriers.
His lips began to move. He was trying to put that mystery, that emotion,
into words ... "It's white," he murmured, "and
sharp--burning--like--like"--his fancy fumbled--"like the inside of a
cold flame." He shook his head. That did not describe the marvelous
quality of the night. And yet--if the world had gone up to heaven in a
single, streaming point of icy fire and a fellow stood in it, frozen, swept
up out of a fellow's body.... Again he shook his head and his eyes were
possessed by the wistful, apologetic smile. He wished he were not
tormented by this queer need of describing his sensations. He
remembered very vividly one of the many occasions when it had roused
his father's anger. Dickie, standing with his hand against the cold bricks
of The Aura, smiled with his lips, not happily, but with a certain
amusement, thinking of how Sylvester's hand had cracked against his
cheek and sent all his thoughts flying like broken china. He had been
apologizing for his slowness over an errand--something about leaves, it
had been--the leaves of those aspens in the yard--he had told his father
that they had been little green flames--he had stopped to look at them.
"You damn fool!" Sylvester had said as he struck.
"You damn fool!" Once, when a stranger asked five-year-old Dickie his
name, he had answered innocently "Dickie-damn-fool!"
"They'll probably put it on my tombstone," Dickie concluded, and,

stung by the cold, he shrank into his coat and stumbled round the
corner of the street. The reek of spirits trailed behind him through the
purity like a soiled rag.
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