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These remained with him for years afterward, and with them the memory of the blind woman sitting stiffy erect and staring vacantly into his face. "He has told her everything," said Cynthia "after twenty years." The road was steep, and Christopher, descending from the big, lumbering cart, left the oxen to crawl slowly up the incline.
Sam came back to the red-faced man. "Can you give me a job?" he asked firmly. "Hey, Stiffy," growled Mahooley. "Look what's askin' for a job!" Stiffy laughed heartily. Thus he propitiated his irritable partner. It didn't cost anything. Sam, blushing, set his jaw and stood it out. "What can you do?" Mahooley demanded. "Any hard work." "You don't look like one of these here Hercules." "Try me."
Stiffy explained how the debits were on one side, the credits on the other. Each customer had a page to himself. Joe observed that before turning up his account Stiffy had consulted an index in a separate folder. Joe allowed himself to be reluctantly satisfied, and returned to his seat by the stove.
Then, ordering the mulatto man astern, Johnson gave him the tiller, and sat near, nodding, till the second wharf on the starboard was passed. "Now Gabriel can't overhaul me," Johnson exclaimed; "thar's no more road on the Dorchester side, an' the Somerset roads is all gashed by creeks an' barred by farm-gates. I'll sink that dab an' stiffy."
Here Stiffy spoke up from his cubby-hole: "Hell! Musq'oosis don't need anybody to feed him. He's well fixed. Got a first-class credit balance." Joe, ever on the watch, saw Mahooley turn his head abruptly and scowl at his partner. Stiffy closed his mouth suddenly. Joe, possessed by a single idea, jumped to the conclusion that Musq'oosis had something to do with the mystery he was on the track of.
As soon as they finished eating, they wandered outside to smoke and make common cause against the interloper. For their usual card-game they adjourned to Stiffy and Mahooley's. Only Joe and Sam were left, one sitting on each side of the fire with that look in his eyes that girls know of determination not to be the first to leave. Bela came and sat down between them with sewing.
Now they always hangin' round Stiffy and Mahooley's." This argument was not without weight; nevertheless, Beattie continued to shake his head. "Can't do it unless you get a chaperon." "Chaperon?" repeated Bela, puzzled. "Get a respectable woman to come live with you, and I'll say all right." Bela nodded and marched out of the store without wasting any further words.
Mahooley pointed to them with pride as the only houses north of the landing built of boards, but they had a sad and awkward look there in the wilderness, notwithstanding. Within the store of the French outfit, Stiffy, the trader, was audibly totting up his accounts in his little box at the rear, while Mahooley, his associate, sat with his chair tipped back and his heels on the cold stove.
At the door Stiffy said, as a matter of form: "Coming, Mahooley?" Mahooley, glancing obliquely at the inscrutable Bela, decided on a bold play. "Don't wait for me," he said. "I'll stop and talk to Bela for a while. Musq'oosis will play propriety," he added with a laugh. Bela made no remark, and the shack emptied except for the three of them. Mary Otter had gone to call at the mission.
Elder sons there were to my recollection no daughters moved too as with their heads in the clouds; notably "Stiffy," eldest of all, whom we supposed gorgeous, who affected us as sublime and unapproachable and to whom we thus applied the term in use among us before we had acquired for reference to such types the notion of the nuance, the dandy, the dude, the masher.
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