“Are you the superintendent?”
Ken Smith grunted, “Foreman.” Light showed ahead and soon a ladder and a round, white eye above. Ken boosted her. “Scraggle out, kid,” he said. “And don’t come in here any more. They got rats in this sewer as big as you.”
Nora climbed. She thought Mr. Ken Smith was about half a nice person and half not very nice. There was no such thing as a rat as big as she. The higher she got and the closer to the light, the surer she felt of that. In a moment, she was outdoors.
The light hurt her eyes for a while.
When the hurt stopped, she started over Washington.
All around, now, were the big buildings, the skyscrapers, and the shops. The sidewalks, though broad, couldn’t hold the people. They tramped in the snow, packing it down, and they bulged out in the street, off the curb, and cars honked at them. Cars piled up at every cross street; people going over in big bunches sometimes made the cars wait over an entire green light, honking in fury, but helpless.
There were all kinds of people and thousands of kids. There was everything on earth in the store windows—mannequins in silk dresses and men’s silk dressing gowns, cameras and Kodak film and wonderful, enormous snapshots in the window of Eller’s Photo Store. There were toys and windows full of candies and huge boxes in Slater’s, wrapped in silver paper and tied with silver ribbons with imitation holly berries as big as apples and probably a lot of nothing, Nora thought, in the boxes. On every corner, there was a Santa Claus ringing a dinnerbell and holding out a box for money and down Central Avenue the Salvation Army was playing carols, but she decided it would take too long to push her way up and watch the lassies with trombones, though she wanted to.
She got across Central finally, after waiting two lights, and she decided every soul in the county must be doing their last-minute shopping. She noticed, too, that people were in kind of a bad temper-doubtless because they were shopping so late and the things they wanted were all shopworn by now or sold out and they had to take second choice. The carillon in St. Mark’s suddenly began to play “Silent Night” and a few large flakes of snow came past Nora’s nose, making her look aloft at the weather. She saw it was completely cloudy, and she expected it would soon snow hard, giving them a white Christmas in the Sister Cities three times over, counting the snow on the street.
The press of people—intent, hurrying, pouring into stores and pouring out, people for the most part bigger and stronger than Nora—became worrisome. The prospect of hard snow also offered problems. Simmons Park began to seem quite far away, though it was actually only a few very long blocks, less than a mile, from Central. A mile was usually as nothing to a determined Nora. But a mile in a mob, with the threat of snow—and no lunch—was something else.
When she got across Central, she began to wonder whom she could find to help her. If her father had been at work, in the Phillips Building, everything would be simple; but he wasn’t; he was in Ferndale, stuffing himself with roast pork and potatoes.