THE Nick Adams STORIES by Ernest Hemingway Page B

antagonize him.”
    â€œDo you think he’ll cooperate?”
    â€œNot if you act rough.”
    â€œWe’ll go see him.”
    Inside the store Suzy had gone straight through past the glass showcases, the opened barrels, the boxes, the shelves of canned goods, seeing nothing nor anyone until she came to the post office with its lockboxes and it’s general delivery and stamp window. The window was down and she went straight on to the back of the store. Mr. Packard was opening a packing box with a crowbar. He looked at her and smiled.
    â€œMr. John,” the hired girl said, speaking very fast. “There’s two wardens coming in that’s after Nickie. He cleared out last night and his kid sister’s gone with him. Don’t let on about that. His mother knows it and it’s all right. Anyhow she isn’t going to say anything.”
    â€œDid he take all your groceries?”
    â€œMost of them.”
    â€œYou pick out what you need and make a list and I’ll check it over with you.”
    â€œThey’re coming in now.”
    â€œYou go out the back and come in the front again. I’ll go and talk to them.”
    Suzy walked around the long frame building and climbed the front steps again. This time she noticed everything asshe came in. She knew the Indians who had brought in the baskets and she knew the two Indian boys who were looking at the fishing tackle in the first showcases on the left. She knew all the patent medicines in the next case and who usually bought them. She had clerked one summer in the store and she knew what the penciled code letters and numbers meant that were on the cardboard boxes that held shoes, winter overshoes, wool socks, mittens, caps and sweaters. She knew what the baskets were worth that the Indians had brought in and that it was too late in the season for them to bring a good price.
    â€œWhy did you bring them in so late, Mrs. Tabeshaw?” she asked.
    â€œToo much fun Fourth of July,” the Indian woman laughed.
    â€œHow’s Billy?” Suzy asked.
    â€œI don’t know, Suzy. I no see him four weeks now.”
    â€œWhy don’t you take them down to the hotel and try and sell them to the resorters?” Suzy said.
    â€œMaybe,” Mrs. Tabeshaw said. “I took once.”
    â€œYou ought to take them every day.”
    â€œLong walk,” Mrs. Tabeshaw said.
    While Suzy was talking to the people she knew and making a list of what she needed for the house the two wardens were in the back of the store with Mr. John Packard.
    Mr. John had gray-blue eyes and dark hair and a dark mustache and he always looked as though he had wandered into a general store by accident. He had been away from northern Michigan once for eighteen years when he was a young man and he looked more like a peace officer or an honest gambler than a storekeeper. He had owned good saloons in his time and run them well. But when the country had been lumbered off he had stayed and bought farming land. Finally when the county had gone local option he had bought this store. Healready owned the hotel. But he said he didn’t like a hotel without a bar and so he almost never went near it. Mrs. Packard ran the hotel. She was more ambitious than Mr. John and Mr. John said he didn’t want to waste time with people who had enough money to take a vacation anywhere in the country they wanted and then came to a hotel without a bar and spent their time sitting on the porch in rocking chairs. He called the resorters “change-of-lifers” and he made fun of them to Mrs. Packard but she loved him and never minded when he teased her.
    â€œI don’t mind if you call them change-of-lifers,” she told him one night in bed. “I had the damn thing but I’m still all the woman you can handle, aren’t I?”
    She liked the resorters because some of them brought culture and Mr. John said she loved culture like a lumberjack loved