It was the day after we got back from the city that Catty and I were
walking along the street toward the hotel on a sort of a still hunt for
Arthur Peabody Kinderhook, when Banty Gage and Skoodles Gordon came
along from the direction of the Methodist church. Catty and I weren’t
thinking about kids at all, but about Kinderhook and how we were going
to catch him at whatever it was he was doing. We didn’t have any time to
monkey with kids just then, but it looked like Banty and Skoodles
calculated to do some monkeying with us.
As soon as they saw us they set up a holler and began making luny
motions with their hands. I expect they had an idea they were cutting up
a smart caper, but I didn’t see it that way, and I guess Catty didn’t,
either. I know he didn’t as soon as Banty started to yell names at him
and call him a tramp and a jail-bird. At that Catty turned kind of white
and his lips got thin and straight, and his eyes got so they were kind
of unpleasant to look at. He walked a little bit faster, but otherwise
he didn’t make any sign. Banty and Skoodles came right on, still
bellowing at Catty. I guess they felt safe because they were right on
Main Street and a lot of people were around. But they didn’t know Catty.
When Catty had a job of work to do he never bothered about how many
folks were around to see him do it. All he thought of was that it had to
be done, and that the time to do it was _then_. He waited till Banty and
Skoodles were right in front of us, and then he stopped.
“Wait a minute,” says he.
“Tramp,” says Banty.
“Ragamuffin,” says Skoodles.
Catty turned to me. “You keep out of this,” says he. “It’s my job,
private. I got to tend to it alone. No matter what happens, you keep
out.”
“I won’t,” says I.
“You will,” says he, “or I’ll try to lick you when I’m done with these.”
That was like him, too. He didn’t say he _would_ lick me, but that he
would _try_ to lick me. It was that kind of a polite way he had that was
natural. Dad says Catty was a gentleman by instinct. It wouldn’t have
been friendly if he had said he would lick me, but there was a kind of a
sort of courtesy about his doubting whether he could. Anyhow, he walked
straight up to Banty and Skoodles.
“You’ve got a lickin’ comin’,” says he, “and I’m a-goin’ to deliver the
goods. I’ve warned you. I won’t be called a tramp or a jail-bird and
I’ll soak any feller that called them to me.”
“You dassent start any fight here,” says Banty, and he believed it, too.
“Tramp!” he says as a sort of dare.
“I’m goin’ to give both of you a lickin’,” says Catty. “Either one at a
time or both of you together. I calc’late you’re the kind that ’ll want
to fight two to one.”
“We won’t fight here—not on Main Street.”
“You bet you _will_,” says Catty.
“Don’t you dast,” says Skoodles. “We’ll have you arrested.”
Catty didn’t wait for anything more. He took a step ahead and he slapped
Banty with one hand and Skoodles with the other. “Now fight,” says he,
and they fought. In a second the whole street looked like it was full of
fists and feet and kids mauling each other. I expected Catty would get a
thundering walloping—two to one—but I didn’t mix in. It wasn’t because I
didn’t want to, or because I was afraid to, and I made up my mind that
if they did thrash Catty I’d catch each of them alone and lamm him good.
But Catty wanted to fight his own fight, so I stood back and watched.
Folks began to come from all directions to see the rumpus. Banty was
coming at Catty from one side and Skoodles from the other, and it looked
like he had bit off more than he could chaw. If he went for one the
other hit him a lick, and if he went for the other the first one got in
a punch. But Catty sort of worked around till he got his back to a store
window, and then it wasn’t so bad. He acted like he was just fighting to
keep them off, and I thought he knew he couldn’t do any more than that;
but all of a sudden he jumped at Skoodles and quicker than a cat he hit
him twice, once on the nose and once on the stummick, and Skoodles sat
down to think it over. Then Catty went for Banty in earnest, and in
about two minutes Banty was running up the street, hollering, with his
lips swollen and one eye that wouldn’t take a prize in a beauty show for
a week.
Catty looked after Banty and he looked down at Skoodles, and then he
grinned. “Guess they won’t call names for a day or so,” he says, and
just then Mrs. Gage came through the crowd that had gathered. She was so
mad she was white.
“That’s what we get for having tramps in this town. I said right along
he was a young tough. He’ll be killing somebody or something. It hain’t
civilized,” says she. “Where’s the constable or the town marshal?” she
says. “I guess he’ll go to jail for this.”
“I’ll go to jail if I have to,” says Catty, “but nobody ’ll call me a
tramp or a jail-bird. I’m respectable, ma’am, and I’m entitled to be
treated respectable.”
“You’ll be treated respectable,” says she. “I’m going to——”
“Wouldn’t if I was you, Mrs. Gage,” says Mr. Wade, who must have been
watching the fight. “If I ever saw anybody get a licking he deserved, it
was your son. It was two to one, too. If I were you, ma’am, I’d go home
and keep kind of still about this. I’ll be a witness for this boy, and I
guess most of this crowd will. You will, won’t you, Captain Winton?”
“I shall be glad to,” says the captain. “This boy stood up for himself
the way a gentleman should. He showed the proper spirit. Your son got
what he deserved.”
Mrs. Gage turned around without another word and marched off, and
Captain Winton shook hands with Catty. “Young man,” said he, “I want to
congratulate you. A boy with less courage would never have resented an
insult when he had to fight two to one.”
“I didn’t have to,” said Catty. “Wee-wee would have helped, but I
wouldn’t let him. It was _my_ fight.”
“If the Gages make any trouble, come to me,” says Captain Winton, and
then we went along toward the hotel to look after our business with Mr.
Kinderhook.
It wasn’t the last we heard of that scrap, by a long sight, but on the
whole I guess it did Catty more good than it did harm. It made him some
friends, and if it made his enemies madder than ever, why, what of it?
They were about as mean to him as they could be before, and a little
more trouble stirred up couldn’t hardly be noticed. I will say that a
good many folks in town took sides with Mrs. Gage, and there was lots of
talk, and some of them really tried to get together enough influence to
have Catty sent to the Reform School because he was a dangerous
character. But my father got together with Captain Winton and Mr. Wade,
and they backed Catty up like good ones, so that nothing came of it. But
one thing did come and that was that Banty and Skoodles didn’t call any
more names to Catty when he could hear them. But somebody did sneak
around at night and tack a sign on their store with “Tramp” printed on
it in big letters, and every day, almost, Catty or his father would get
a post-card with nothing on it but just “Tramp—git out of town.”
We made up our minds that it was Skoodles and Banty doing this, and I
says to Catty that we’d better get our heads together to make them quit.
At first Catty wasn’t going to pay any attention, but after a day or so
he got pretty mad.
“Guess we better do somethin’,” says he. “I don’t care so much, but it
hain’t right I should stand it. I got to stand up for myself and make
folks respect me and Dad. If I don’t make them, why, they’ll jest go on
_not_ respectin’ us. The way to git folks respectful is to _make_ them
that way—fix it so they know if that hain’t respectful somethin’
onpleasant ’ll happen quick.”
“What ’ll we do?” says I.
“I dunno,” says he. “It ’ll take some thinkin’, but, whatever it is,
it’s got to make ’em look ridic’lous. It’s got to make everybody give
’em the laugh.”
“That’s the idee,” says I, but I hadn’t any more notion than a rabbit
what it was we could do to make folks laugh at them. Catty he set to
work thinking it over between-times when we weren’t busy following
around after Mr. Kinderhook. Of course, he came first and we had to look
after him before we took up any other kind of work, but there was times
when we were waiting or something, and then Catty figured on a scheme to
upset Banty’s apple-cart.
Another thing we did when we were waiting was to study—at least Catty
studied. It wasn’t spelling or arithmetic, either, but a book that was
called _Decorum_, and it was all about how to act. It told you how to
act if you met a lady on the street, and how to act if you called on the
minister, and what to do if somebody spilled soup on your pants, and
which hand to take off your hat with, and all about how to eat, and that
sort of thing. It was a most particular kind of a book, and it knew just
exactly how a fellow ought to act no matter where he was or what he was
doing. I never read it all through, but I’ll bet it told you the polite
thing to say to a man with long whiskers driving a runaway sorrel horse
in a northerly direction on a Thursday afternoon if you had a cold in
your nose. I didn’t care about those things much, but Catty was so bent
on being respectable that he didn’t miss a word of it, and most of it he
learned by heart and then recited to his father, evenings.
Yes, sir, by the time Catty got through with that book you couldn’t have
fooled him _any place_. He knew how to act if the President of the
United States stepped on his sore toe, and what to say if a middle-aged
schoolteacher with a wig was to have it blow off in his face. He knew
just how a man ought to act if a lady he didn’t know offered him a piece
of pie, and what he ought to say if a perfect stranger had a conniption
fit in front of the band-stand on the Fourth of July. The amount of
information in that book was enough to surprise an owl, but what anybody
was going to do with all of it I couldn’t see. But Catty could, and he
practised it. I had to make believe I was all sorts of folks in all
sorts of places so he could tip his hat to me, or ask how my pulse was
beating, or how come I didn’t paint out the freckles on my nose. I got
so I could be _anybody_ in a second. Catty would tell me I was a young
woman that just lost her rubber in the mud—and I would _be_ it. I have
been his grandmother and his aunt and the minister’s wife and a pair of
twins and a senator and the coachman. I’ve been two men or a crowd, and
I’ve been a sewing society and the actors in a play. I’ll bet I could be
a wall-eyed moon calf with his head where his tail ought to be if he
would give me half a second to get in the right frame of mind. It was a
great book, I’ll tell you, and we had lots of fun with it; at least I
did, but Catty took it serious. I’ll bet there was never anybody so
chock full of decorum as he was. It oozed out of his ears.
It took all that trouble to be respectable. I began to feel as if I
wasn’t so very dog-gone respectable myself, but it didn’t hurt near so
bad as the earache. If it took all that study and practice to be
respectable, I made up my mind I would as soon be something
else—red-headed, say, or tongue-tied, or a clown in a circus, or an
acrobat. You could be a clown or an acrobat without half so much
study—and make money with it, to say nothing about the fun you’d have.
I’d rather be a first-class bareback rider than as respectable as the
fellow that wrote the book. But Catty wouldn’t—and everybody to his
taste, as the boy said when he saw his uncle kiss a pig.
It got so poor Mr. Atkins almost starved to death because he was afraid
to eat. Every time he grabbed a spoon or a knife or a fork Catty was
right after him, reciting out of the book and making him do it all over
in just the exact way the book said. I felt pretty sorry for him, but
Catty said it was for his good and he had to be ready to mingle in good
society as soon as he got to be as respectable as he could and had the
money to buy a silk hat.
But that hasn’t anything to do with Mr. Kinderhook and his friend
Binger, has it?
Well, we thought we knew what Kinderhook had in mind, but we had to
prove it. We had to get what lawyers call evidence so that everybody
would believe us when we told them that instead of making them rich
Kinderhook figured to smouge away every dollar that was put into his
churn-factory. But it is a heap different to know a thing and to be able
to prove it. You bet it is.
After the fight we went to the hotel, and there was Mr. Kinderhook, as
usual, sitting on the front porch with about a dozen folks around,
admiring him and taffying him and acting like they thought he was the
man that invented the sun and moon. He just sat there and took it, and
once in a while he let out a remark that sounded awful wise. When he let
off one of those remarks folks would waggle their heads and sit and try
to remember just what he said and how he said it, so that they could
repeat it afterward and make believe they had thought it up themselves.
But I noticed that the conversation always got around to churns pretty
quickly and to stock and to such-like things. Catty whispered to me that
those folks were just ripe to pick and all Kinderhook had to do was
shake the tree.
He was letting go of more and more stock, or promising to. We kept
hearing of somebody else he had promised to sell to, and it began to
look like we would have to get a hustle on if we were going to save the
bacon. But we weren’t getting any place at all.
It was that night that Catty says to me: “Wee-wee, what we need is a
plan of campaign. We’re jest nosin’ around, as it is, without any idee
what we’re tryin’ to do. Now let’s git up a reg’lar scheme and stick to
it.”
“Go ahead,” says I. “You do the scheme and I’ll do the stickin’. I’m
better at it.”
“I’ll do it,” says he. “In the mornin’ I’ll have a scheme, if I have to
set up all night to git it.”
“Does that decorum book say anythin’ about the good manners of sittin’
up all night?” says I.
“It says a lot about askin’ fool questions,” says Catty, with a grin.
“Meet me as early as you kin to-morrer. We’ll have a busy day.”