Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Silent Sam and other stories.djvu/387



T was after nightfall in that part of New York which is, to the rest of the city, the top story of the house—where the servants sleep. And now, when the business district of the lower town was as dark as a deserted basement, the lights were lit in all these shining windows; and behind the drawn blinds, clerks and bookkeepers, shop-girls and working-women laughed and chatted in their tiny cells and cubicles. Their rooms were piled up, in layer on layer, to form continuous blocks of houses; and these rose from the unbroken pavements with an appearance of standing ankle deep in a pool of frozen stone—as if an inundation of fluid rock had hardened evenly over the streets and buried every inequality of the green sod and brown soil of a suburb under a barren crust of asphalt and cement.

Up one of the bare gorges of brick and pavement, Larkin struggled against all the winds of December that fought and jostled him, beating down the flickering gas-lights until they gasped behind their rattling lamp-glasses, and puffing stiff blasts along the sidewalk to sweep the stones as clean as ice. Bending forward, with his chin in his collar and his shoulders hunched about his neck, he looked as if the violence of the wind had pounded his head into his body and crushed his