A day or two after that Catty and I were sitting on the platform of the
station, waiting for the train to come in with some things Jack Phillips
had ordered. Along came Captain Winton, the president of the bank, and
Mr. Moss, the hardware-man. They sat down a little ways from us and
began to talk.
“We’ve got to get ready for it,” says Captain Winton. “It won’t be long
before mill-hands will be moving in here with their families, and we
haven’t any places for them to live. I’ve been thinking it over, and it
looks to me like some of us could get together and build a dozen houses
or so and pick up a nice profit—or make a good income from rents.”
“I’ve been thinking about that, too. You own a piece of land down the
new factory way, don’t you?”
“Ten acres,” says Captain Winton. “We could run streets through and
start in by building a dozen cottages. Then, if the thing went as I
expect, we could put up more.”
“How much would we have to put into it?”
“Well, my guess is that we could put up the houses for a couple of
thousand apiece—maybe twenty-five hundred. The bank would loan on each
house and lot fifteen hundred. A dozen, including land and everything,
would stand us in thirty-six thousand, and we would have to raise half
of that.”
“I’ve got a few thousand lying loose,” says Mr. Moss. “I wouldn’t want
to put everything into this building thing, because I’m still hoping to
persuade Mr. Kinderhook to sell me a block of stock—say five thousand
dollars. He’s pretty friendly with me.”
“I don’t know. He seems to want to hang onto it.”
“_You_ got some,” says Mr. Moss.
“That was on account of the bank, I guess. He wanted to have us
interested.... But I think we can get four or five men here to go into
this building thing. We could form a company. I’ll put in my land at
five thousand and take another five thousand besides.”
“You can count on me for two or three thousand, and Gage ’ll come in for
some, and so will Gordon and Piddlecomb and Bockers.”
“Tell any of them you see to meet at the bank this afternoon. We want to
go at it as quickly as we can.”
Then the train came in. We didn’t hear any more, but there didn’t seem
to be any more to hear. On the way back to the store Catty was pretty
quiet. As soon as we got there he hollered for Jack Phillips.
“Jack,” he says, “there’s goin’ to be a dozen houses built here all in a
bunch, and we got to land the job.”
“Tell me about it,” says Jack.
Catty told him all we had heard, and Jack got quite excited. “I wonder
how they’ll let the contract. On bids, probably.”
“With Mr. Gage and Mr. Bockers mixed up in it we won’t have much of a
chance,” says Catty.
“That’s right,” says Jack, and he looked discouraged, but Catty spoke
right up and says: “We got to have a chance. We got to land that job.
There’s big money in it.”
“Pretty big. We ought to make five thousand dollars, anyhow, and maybe
more.”
“If they know we’re biddin’ we’ll never land it,” says Catty, “so we got
to fool ’em. It’s fair. We’ll do ’em as good a job as anybody if we get
a chance, and it hain’t right for them to act like they will toward
us.... I guess I got an idee. You’ll have to do it, Jack. We’ll git up a
company and call it by a fancy name. It ’ll be a company over to
Harleyville. You’ll have to go over there and have letter-heads printed
and kind of make believe have an office, and we kin do all the business
by mail. Then, when the contracts are all signed up, we’ll be the folks
that do the work. How’s that?”
“Bully,” says Jack.
I guess Catty was right about the chance the Atkinses would have had to
land the contract, because I heard Mr. Gage and Mr. Bockers talking in
Gage’s back yard, and they both said that it didn’t matter what kind of
a bid the Atkinses made they wouldn’t let them do the work.
“My wife’s dead set on getting those people out of town,” says Mr. Gage.
“So’s mine. If they have the nerve to make a bid, why, we’ll just throw
it out.”
I told this to Catty and he grinned a little and then squared up his
jaw. In a day or two there was an advertisement for plans and bids in
the paper, and Jack went over to Harleyville. He had been working on
plans and specifications, and he had had letter-paper printed with
“North American Construction Company” on it. He signed his letters that
way, with only an initial “P” under it in pen and ink. They were fine
letters, too, and guaranteed the kind of work that would be done—and it
_would_ be the best work, Jack said. He said he wanted Atkins & Phillips
to get to be known everywhere as a firm that did better work than
anybody else and always did what it guaranteed to do.
Atkins & Phillips didn’t make any bid at all. Mr. Wade was appointed by
the North American Construction Company to be its agent in town, and it
gave him quite a reputation, because the name sounded as if it was a
whopping big company. Mr. Wade knew all about it, and the way he laughed
was enough to make your sides ache. He said it was regular Napoleon
tactics, fooling the enemy and hitting them hard where they weren’t
looking for it. He got right on the job and kept after Captain Winton,
who wouldn’t care himself who got the job, and he kept after Mr. Gage
and Mr. Bockers, until they thought the North American Construction
Company was about right. He said the company would put up a bond to do
the work right.
There were three other bids from out-of-town companies, but between
Jack’s letters and Mr. Wade the North American landed the job and the
contracts were signed by Captain Winton, president of the building
company, and by Mr. Wade as agent for the North American, and the bond
was made and everything. Nobody said a word, and then the lumber began
to come and carpenters from out of town—and the work started.
Well, maybe you think there wasn’t a row then when folks found out Jack
Phillips was in charge of the job and Mr. Atkins was a kind of foreman,
and that the whole work was actually being done by Atkins & Phillips.
Mr. Gage got a lawyer and Bockers got one and they tried every which way
to break the contract, but it was no go. Captain Winton sort of grinned
and wouldn’t have anything to do with it. He said if the Atkins folks
were smart enough to get the contract he guessed they were smart enough
to carry it out, and he told them to come to the bank if they needed any
money—which they did.
It was right after this that Catty made his father go to the
clothing-store and buy two suits of clothes, one for business and one
for Sundays, and the right kind of hats to go with them. Well, sir, when
Mr. Atkins got dressed up in those duds you wouldn’t have known him, and
I guess he hardly knew himself. He kept his hair cut now, and his beard
trimmed down into a point, and if he wasn’t as good-looking a man as we
had in town, I’ll _eat_ him. He didn’t look any more like a tramp than
Mr. Rockefeller did.
Those clothes seemed to make quite a difference in him, too. He _acted_
different. He didn’t act so much like Mr. Atkins any more, but like
another man that wasn’t shiftless at all and really liked to work. That
is, he acted that way part of the time, and when he was feeling
shiftless he sort of kept out of sight so folks wouldn’t see it. Catty
said his father was really getting interested in the work, and he was
hoping he would get interested in being respectable.
From that day nobody ever saw Mr. Atkins in any clothes but good ones.
He didn’t wear his painter’s suit, though he wanted to. Catty wouldn’t
let him. Every morning before Mr. Atkins could get out of his room Catty
looked him all over to see he was dressed right. It was funny. It was
almost as if Catty had taken a jack-knife and whittled out a man, his
father was getting to be so different to what he used to be.
Catty and I began trailing around after Mr. Kinderhook whenever we got a
chance, but we hadn’t even seen anything that looked suspicious. He just
looked rich and important, and he acted rich and important and puffed
up. To see him sitting on the hotel porch like he owned the whole state,
and being kind to folks and behaving toward them just like he thought
they were as good as he was, was a sight. He never talked about his
factory and what he was going to manufacture unless somebody started it
first and then urged him on, and then he acted sort of like the subject
tired him and he didn’t want to be bothered with it. We listened to him
a dozen times, and couldn’t see how he was planning to gouge anybody.
“Maybe he’s reformed,” says I.
“Bet he hain’t. He don’t look reformed,” says Catty. “If he was the kind
of man that was willin’ to make money sellin’ cheat medicine to old
women with the rheumatiz that wouldn’t help ’em a bit and maybe made ’em
worse, why, he’s bad yet. But I can’t see how he’s plannin’ to _be_
bad.”
“It’s sure he hain’t tryin’ to sell any shares in his factory.”
“Looks that way,” says Catty. “’Course he sold some to Captain Winton.”
“But not to anybody else, and everybody is crazy to buy.”
“I heard him say this mornin’ that his company was all incorporated,
whatever that is, and he expected to start in buildin’ soon,” says
Catty. “I wonder what ‘incorporated’ is?”
“Haven’t any idee,” says I. “Maybe it means somethin’ like planned out.”
“Maybe. I heard him tell Mr. Gage that he didn’t have any patent on this
churn of his, because if he was to patent it he would have to give away
the secret and somebody would sell it. He says there’s a secret part,
and nobody kin find out how to make it, so he hain’t goin’ to git a
patent at all, but just go to work and manufacture and prevent anybody
from findin’ out how it’s done.”
“Sounds kind of fishy,” says I. “Everybody swallers it down,” says
Catty, “but if there’s any cheatin’ in this I’ll bet it’s got somethin’
to do with that secret.” That very afternoon we didn’t have anything
else to do, so we fussed around close to Mr. Kinderhook, keeping watch
of him and listening to what he had to say. After a while he got up and
walked down the street, and we trailed after him until he got to the
station. He went into the telegraph-office and wrote out a message. We
waited till he was gone and then we went right in where Tom Purvis was
clicking the keys. We could do that because I knew Tom mighty well and
he didn’t mind. We stood right back of Tom’s chair, making believe we
were interested in what he was doing and how he sent messages, but
really we wanted to get a sight of what Mr. Kinderhook had written.
Pretty soon Tom came to it and began clacking away. I could read it over
his shoulders. It was addressed to a man by the name of Matthew Binger
in New York, and it said:
Come at once. Crop ripe.
Now that was a funny message, it seemed to me, because there weren’t any
crops ripe just then, and Mr. Kinderhook wasn’t interested in crops if
they had been. Catty and I went off after that, but we couldn’t make any
head nor tail of it. It just looked silly, but anyhow we made up our
minds we would keep meeting trains till this man Binger came, and we
would see what he was up to and what crop Mr. Kinderhook had in mind.
Two days later a stranger got off of the train. He was short and fat,
and he looked almost as rich as Kinderhook did.
“Bet that’s Binger,” says Catty.
“Bet it is, too,” says I.
So we rode with Pazzy Bills back to the hotel and saw the man register.
Sure enough, his name was Matthew Binger and he asked if a man named
Kinderhook was stopping there. The clerk allowed there was, and Mr.
Binger asked the clerk if he would take up his card. The clerk done so,
and pretty soon down comes Mr. Kinderhook, peering around like he was
looking for somebody. He didn’t recognize Mr. Binger any more than as if
he had never heard of him till the clerk says, “That’s the gentleman
that wanted to see you, Mr. Kinderhook,” and Kinderhook walked over,
holding the card in his hand and reading it.
“Mr. Binger?” says he, looking at the card again, as if he was making
sure he had the name right.
“Matthew Binger—yes. And is this Mr. Arthur Peabody Kinderhook?”
“It is. What can I do for you?”
“I have come down from New York to talk business with you. Where can we
go and be quiet?”
“Is your business secret, Mr. Binger? Because if it is, we can’t talk. I
don’t do secret business. There’s nothing about my business that any of
my good friends in this town can’t hear. Whatever you’ve got to say to
me can be said right out on the porch—or it can’t be said at all.”
Mr. Binger he acted sulky, but it looked like there wasn’t anything he
could do about it, so they went out and sat in red rocking-chairs, and
Catty and I sat on the steps close by.
“I represent a syndicate in New York, Mr. Kinderhook, and we have heard
that you are about to start the manufacture of a remarkable churn.”
“You are correct, sir. It is a churn that will revolutionize the
business. A year after I start to manufacture there will be no other
churns on the market.”
“So I understand, sir. My associates and myself, sir, wish to make you a
proposition. You have not started to manufacture this churn as yet. It
will require a large outlay of money to do so.”
“No trouble about that, Mr. Binger,” says Kinderhook, with a wave of his
hand.
“Um!... So we understand. We know you are rated well above a million,
but we have an idea that you will not object to making a considerable
sum without the necessity of building a factory.”
“It is not merely the making of money that interests me,” says Mr.
Kinderhook, “but I have grown to like this little town and to want to do
something for its prosperity. I want to see the town grow, sir. It has a
wonderful future.”
“Possibly, but my associates and myself believe we can make a
proposition that will interest you.... As you say, this churn of yours
will put all other churns out of business.”
“Do you, Mr. Binger, represent the Amalgamated Churn Company—the trust?”
“Hush!” says Mr. Binger.
“If you do, sir,” says Kinderhook, “this interview is at an end. You are
afraid of my churn, sir. You do not want my churn to be manufactured
because it will destroy your business. You want to buy me off. Am I
right?”
“Er—well—” Mr. Binger hesitated and hemmed and hawed and acted
embarrassed.
“You go back and tell the churn trust,” says Mr. Kinderhook, in a voice
you could have heard clean to the post-office, “that my churn is not for
sale and I am not for sale.”
“I am empowered to offer you fifty thousand dollars for your secret, Mr.
Kinderhook.”
“Nonsense! Fiddlesticks! I shall make ten times that out of the
manufacture. Good afternoon, Mr. Binger. There is nothing further to
say.”
Right then and there Mr. Kinderhook got up as grand as an emperor and
walked off, leaving Mr. Binger looking like he had bit into an
April-fool sandwich filled with soap.
Catty and I sat a spell and then went off to talk it over.
“That was funny,” says I.
“It was,” says he. “Pretended not to know each other.”
“And Kinderhook telegraphed for him to come,” says I.
“It’s some kind of a snide trick. That’s sure. Those two fellers are in
it together, and they’re tryin’ to fool folks some way. Whatever their
scheme is, it’s pretty slick.”
“You bet,” says I.
“We’ll have to watch both of ’em,” says Catty.
Well, by night it was all over town that the churn trust had offered Mr.
Kinderhook fifty thousand dollars just for his secret because they were
afraid of his churn. Folks were saying that if the churn trust thought
it was worth fifty thousand dollars just to stop it from being
manufactured, why, it would be worth millions to go ahead and sell such
churns. Everybody was talking about it and everybody was crazier than
ever to get a chance to buy some of the stock.