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Updated: June 3, 2025
Hi didn't mean no trouble!" Cockney bleated. "Hit was the nyme 'e called me. 'E myde me see red, that's wot." "Would have been a damn good job if he'd landed!" cried Boston's voice. There was an emphatic chorus of approval of this sentiment from the hands, from squareheads and stiffs both. "We'd have been rid of one o' them, anyhow!" piped up Blackie. The backing gave Cockney heart.
But if you want to git some of the real thing to put in your phonygraft jest come down to the pasture to-morrow when the boys are breakin' horses. Your hair's kind of wavy, I notice, but it will put crimps in it to hear Bill Lightfoot or some of them Sunflower stiffs when they git bucked onto a rock pile. And say, if you call yourself a rider I can give you a snake for to-day."
What is thought to be wrong in one country will be the accepted practice just over the border line. It's all in the viewpoint. I not only go into saloons with men friends of mine, but sometimes I play poker or roulette or faro just to please them. And listen: Never in all my rough-and-ready life in railroad camps have I been insulted by regular stiffs, as the laborers are called.
Now, looky here, you bloody heathen. It'll cost you just five hundred dollars to recover these two stiffs, an' close my mouth. If you don't come through I'll make a belch t' th' newspapers an' they'll keel haul an' skull-drag th' Chinese Six Companies an' the Hop Sing tong through the courts for evadin' th' laws o' th' Interstate Commerce Commission, an' make 'em look like monkeys generally.
With that thought of rebellion in my mind, I watched my watchmates that night with more tolerance than my eyes had yet shown them. I wanted to judge what stuff was in them. The stiffs whispered together and eyed us furtively. I did not like the stuff I saw in them.
Bucko Lynch curbed his vocabulary and stopped using his fists, as the captain ordered, but he didn't stop working his men. There was no slackness in his watch; he kept us up to scratch. That made the starboard stiffs especially bitter against him. They felt themselves cheated of the easy times Fitzgibbon's men were having. But the sailors didn't feel that way about it.
Bill Wrenn went below. In the dark passage by the fidley he fell to tremorous weeping. But the brackish hydrant water that stopped his nose-bleed saved him from hysterics. He climbed to the top deck, and now he could again see his brother pilgrim, the moon. The stiffs and bosses were talking excitedly of the fight. Tim rushed up to gurgle: "Great, Bill, old man!
"Say," went on Mr. Jarvis, waxing wrathful at the recollection, "what do youse t'ink dem fresh stiffs done de odder night? Started some rough woik in me own dance-joint." "Shamrock Hall?" said Smith. "I heard about it." "Dat's right, Shamrock Hall. Say, I got it in for dem gazebos, sure I have. Surest t'ing you know." Smith beamed approval. "That," he said, "is the right spirit.
People were coming along with torches all the time, looking at the catacombs and reading the inscriptions cut in the rock, and after awhile I went back to where I left dad, and he was gone, but after awhile I found him standing up with the stiffs. He was glad to see me, and wanted to know if I thought he was' dead. I told him I was sure he was alive, though he had a deathly look on his face.
Kitchell was raging to and fro in the cabin in a frenzy of drink, axe in hand, smashing glassware, hacking into the wood-work, singing the while at the top of his voice: "As through the drop I go, drop I go, As through the drop I go, drop I go, As through the drop I go, Down to hell that yawns below, Twenty stiffs all in a row Damn your eyes"
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