At least in height, "Big Lou" was gigantic. She was fully six feet tall; she stooped a little and was extremely thin, with a hollow chest and narrow flanks, partially hidden by an old red cotton dressing-gown; but the long arms were like flails, and Lou had a temper that did not hesitate to use them as such. Her dirty brown hair was already touched with gray; she had almost no chin; her nose was a smudge in her sodden face and her cheeks were heavy with years of drunkenness. Her mouth hung loose and quarrelsome, and, as she bent over to look hard at Mary, her breath was foul. She addressed herself, however, entirely to the black-browed Stevens. "Where'd you git her?" she asked, as if Mary were one of the animals not gifted with articulate speech. Stevens told of their meeting. "Where's she from?" The sailor gave a rapid and wholly fictitious biography. "How old?" "Twenty," said Bill. "I ain't!" protested Mary. But the sailor shot her an ugly look. "Close your trap," he told her, and then, to Big Lou, he repeated: "Twenty." Big Lou picked up the lamp and, holding it in one blackened claw, passed the other over Mary, with dexterous appraisement, from shoulders to knees. "I'll give you a five-spot for her," she croaked. "You'll go to the devil," retorted Bill. "Six?" "Ten." "You're a damned thief, Stevens, that's what you are," growled the old woman. "I'll give you seven, an' not another God damned cent." Mary leaned against the moist wall. She was now past caring, and she hardly heard. "Make it seven-seventy-five," said Bill, with sudden ingratiation. Big Lou raised the lamp again and again regarded the animal, her swollen eyes sharpening. "I'll tell you what I'll do," she said, once more facing the sailor. "Are you goin' to stop here to-night?" "Yes." "Well, I'll come up in the mornin' and take a closer look. If she passes that, I'll give you seven-fifty." Bill's brown face worked in thought, but the thirst for liquor was upon him, and he compromised. "All right," he said--"if you'll give me five down on account." The giantess flung aside her red dressing-gown and, from a black cotton stocking that hung loose upon a shriveled shank, drew a few greasy bills. From these she reluctantly counted five, handed them to Stevens, and returned the rest to their original place of safety. "G'on up," she said. "I stay here till work's done, an' take tolls." From somewhere in the shadows she produced a black flask and, as Mary, with the sailor's tattooed hand tightly under her arm, began the steep ascent, Big Lou settled herself at her post of gatekeeper upon the lowest step. Those stairs seemed almost perpendicular. They rose out of the darkness of the hallway at an alarming angle; each step was close upon a foot high; they were not a yard wide, their upper half was boxed between two walls, and they opened directly into the room that evidently served as the parlor of Big Lou Summerton's establishment.