Next morning I hustled over to Catty’s.
He was up, and when I got there he was talking business to his father,
who had a streak to want to go fishing that morning. Mr. Atkins said he
was worked out and so respectable it hurt, and he wanted to get off
somewheres so he could remember he was just a plain human being again
that folks would set a dog on if he came around at night. He said there
was something _fine_ about having a dog set on you. He said he _liked_
it. He said he liked to have his toes coming out of his shoes and a hole
in his pants. He acted real put-out and rebellious, but Catty wouldn’t
have any of it at all. He just stood his father up and lectured him, and
when he got through Mr. Atkins was so wilted he couldn’t have pulled in
a fish if he’d caught him.
Catty looked at his father kind of sorry-like. “I hate to do it,” says
he, “but it’s for your good, Dad.”
I laughed right out, for _my_ Dad had said the same thing to me once or
twice when we were on our way to the woodshed after I’d done something
he thought I hadn’t ought to. It _was_ funny. Catty and his father had
changed places, and it was Mr. Atkins that was the boy and Catty that
was the Dad.
“Look where we’ve got to,” says Catty. “We’re doing real well. We’re
making a little money, and if we can figger to git the job of buildin’
this factory for Kinderhook, we’ll make quite a lot. You got to be ready
for it. We’re goin’ to build us a house and keep a cook and wear
dressed-up clothes every day in the week. I’ll bet you’ll be runnin’ for
constable or town clerk or somethin’ ’fore you know it.”
“Might git to be town clerk,” says Mr. Atkins, as sorrowful as a man
that’s jest swallowed his collar-button when he was putting on his shirt
to go to church and didn’t have another one, “but I hain’t hankerin’ to
be no constable. I’d be scairt of myself all the time. I wouldn’t be
able to sleep. I’d be all the time orderin’ myself out of town or
shuttin’ myself up in the calaboose or somethin’. No, sirree! No
constable for me!”
“All right, then,” says Catty, “you don’t have to be—if you work hard
and learn table manners. But jest so sure as you don’t keep up to snuff
I’ll make a constable out of you if I have to bust doin’ it.”
Just then Jack Phillips came in and before he knew it Mr. Atkins was
interested in something about the houses they were building, and I saw
he wouldn’t get to go fishing _that_ day.
“Catty,” says I, “if you hain’t easier with your Pa he’ll up and run
away from home.”
“He better not let me ketch him at it,” says Catty, “not when I’ve got
him all improved like he is. I believe he likes it, too, but he jest
makes b’lieve he don’t. He hates to let on.”
“Got that campaign figgered out?” says I. “Got a start,” says he.
“Let’s have her,” says I.
“Wa-al,” says he, “what’s the gist and center of Kinderhook’s whole
scheme?”
“Money,” says I.
“That’s the _object_,” says he.
“Sounds like grammar,” says I. “What’s the subject and the predicate?”
“The subject and the predicate and the adjectives and the whole kit and
b’ilin’,” says he, “is _churn_.”
“Churn?” says I.
“Churn,” says he.
“What churn?” says I.
“The churn he lets on he’s goin’ to manufacture,” says Catty. “He’s got
to let on to manufacture somethin’, and he’s let on it’s a churn. Now,
then, who’s _seen_ that churn? Nobody but Kinderhook. Why? Because it’s
a secret churn, that’s why, to bamboozle folks with. If the churn’s any
good, why, he would go ahead and manufacture it himself and make money.
He wouldn’t want to cheat anybody. So we can figger that the churn
hain’t no good, or if it is some good, why, there’s somethin’ else
crooked about it. He hain’t got no patent. Likely the reason for that is
that he can’t git no patent. See? Well, if we can prove to folks that
the churn ain’t any good, why then we save the bacon, don’t we?”
“Not if Kinderhook’s got their money and disappeared with it,” says I.
“He hain’t took any money yet. He’s just been schemin’ to sell stock. We
got to prove he’s cheatin’ before he begins to take money—or—” He quit
talking, all of a sudden, and I could see some new idea had hit him.
“Maybe we can do better than that,” says he, “but the main plan to work
on is the churn. I’m goin’ to start by findin’ out all I kin about
churns.”
“Good idee,” says I. “Then you can start a shop to repair ’em.”
“Wee-wee,” says he, “I’m goin’ to see Mr. Wade. He’s sharp. I’m a-goin’
to talk it over with him.”
“All right,” says I. “Come on.”
So we went to Mr. Wade’s office, and, as usual, Mr. Wade was reading
about Napoleon Bonaparte. He told us to come in, and we went in.
“We want to talk to you private,” says Catty. “We want to tell you
somethin’ that we don’t want to go no farther—and maybe we’ll want some
help.”
“Let her fly,” says Mr. Wade, with a grin. “It’s about Arthur Peabody
Kinderhook,” says Catty.
“The man that’s going to make us all rich?” says Mr. Wade.
“The man that’s goin’ to cheat you all out of your money,” says Catty.
“Eh?”
“That’s what we come to say. He aims to get away with a heap of money,
and the way he’s goin’ to do it is like this: He lets on he don’t want
to sell any stock in his factory, but he come here to do that and
nothin’ else. That’s what me and Wee-wee have figgered out. He’ll go on
and build a factory and everything, and part of your money will go into
that. It’s part of his bait. But he’ll get what he wants because _he_
isn’t paying any money in at all, is he? No, sir, he’s just puttin’ in
his patent churn, and when the thing is all over you’ll find he’s sold
every dollar of stock to you folks, and got about fifty thousand dollars
out of you for that secret churn he dassent patent—and when you come to
manufacture it you’ll find out it hain’t no good or somethin’.... That’s
the whole idee.”
Mr. Wade he just stared at us and says, “My goodness!” about seventeen
times, and then he wants to know how we know what we’re talkin’ about,
and Catty has to tell him he doesn’t really know, but just suspects it,
and then Mr. Wade looks some happier. But then Catty says, “Did you ever
see that churn?”
“No,” says Mr. Wade.
“Who ever saw it?”
“Nobody,” says Mr. Wade. “But you boys are wrong. Why, a representative
of the churn trust came and offered Mr. Kinderhook thousands and
thousands of dollars if he wouldn’t manufacture it. They said it would
put all the other churns off the market if he did.”
“Why don’t he patent it?” says Catty. “Because he is afraid the churn
trust or somebody would steal his patent and make churns like his.”
“The churn trust hasn’t seen the churn, has it?”
“No, of course not. That’s the thing Mr. Kinderhook is most afraid of.”
“Churn trust don’t know how it works, nor how to make it, nor what it
looks like, nor anything, does it?”
“Certainly not. Didn’t I tell you—”
“If the churn trust don’t know anything about it, how do they know it’s
such a good churn that it will put them out of business?” says Catty,
and Mr. Wade almost fell out of his chair.
“I swan to man!” he says, and swallowed three or four times, and rubbed
his neck in the back and almost nickered like a horse. “I swan to man!
How does it know? I never thought of that. That _is_ funny. That
certainly is funny.”
“It would be funnier if you knew this Mr. Matthew Binger didn’t have
anything to do with a churn trust at all, but was a personal friend of
Kinderhook’s that he had telegraphed to come, wouldn’t it?”
“It would be so funny that somebody would laugh out of the wrong side of
his mouth,” says Mr. Wade.
Then Catty told him about the telegram Mr. Kinderhook had sent to Mr.
Binger to come, and all about that, and then all about how Mr. Atkins
remembered how Kinderhook had another name once and used to run one of
those cheat medicine shows. But by that time Mr. Wade was beginning to
steady down and think. He began to look mad and then he began to laugh.
“So it took a couple of boys to figure out that scheme!” says he. “If
that don’t beat anything! It’s equal to Napoleon at his best. Yes, sir,
it’s better than Napoleon at his best. Napoleon would have been proud to
see through a scheme like you’ve done.... And now we’ve got to warn
everybody.”
“No,” says Catty, “remember, you promised not to tell.”
“But—”
“We haven’t any _proof_,” says Catty. “We _know_ the folks are going to
be cheated, but we can’t prove it, and if we were to make any talk about
Mr. Kinderhook, the way everybody feels right now, and then couldn’t
prove every word we said, they would tar and feather us and ride us on
rails.”
“I guess that’s right,” says Mr. Wade. “But what are we to do?”
“I want you to fix things so that folks won’t pay in their money to Mr.
Kinderhook. Fix it so they pay it to Captain Winton at the bank, and so
that he’ll hang on to it till Mr. Kinderhook proves his churn will make
butter.”
“You mean until Kinderhook gives a public demonstration of his churn?”
“That’s it, in nice long words,” says Catty. “That will make it sure he
doesn’t get the money and sneak away, and he can’t very well refuse
to—to demonstrate, can he? Don’t ask to see the insides of his churn,
but just to have him set it up some place and pour cream into it and
make butter. He can hide his churn in a box, or do anything with it,
just so he proves to folks that it is his churn and that it is making
butter. See?”
“He can’t refuse to do that, and I guess I can talk folks into insisting
on it. But what then?”
“That’s up to Wee-wee and me,” says Catty. “We’ll ’tend to the rest. You
do your part and we’ll do ours.”
We left, and Mr. Wade started over to see Captain Winton and some of the
other business men of the town to suggest about the public demonstration
of the churn. Our idea was to go down to the hotel to see what we could
find out about the model of the churn that Mr. Kinderhook had. We
figured he must have it with him, and our job was to find out where.
“I’m goin’ to write for all the churn catalogues I kin git,” says Catty.
“I want to see what all the churns look like and how they work. It ’ll
come in mighty handy.”
So I sat on the hotel porch and watched to see what Kinderhook would do
while Catty went back and wrote for catalogues. He got back in an hour
and we sat there, waiting and watching, but it was ’most noon before
Kinderhook came down. I guess he was a late sleeper and we heard that he
had his breakfast served up in his room. It was the first time anybody
in our town had ever done such a thing as that, except when they were
sick, and there was a lot of talk about it. Most of us had read how
dukes and earls and suchlike had their breakfasts brought to them in
bed, and how they ate it while some kind of a servant in knee-pants put
on their clothes for them. A good many folks said it marked Kinderhook
as being real aristocratic, but Catty and I wouldn’t agree any with
that; at least, not till we knew he had a servant with tight pants to
dress him while he ate his porridge. And how a man was going to eat
while another fellow was pulling his shirt over his head I couldn’t make
out. Catty couldn’t, either. He said a man was as apt to get a mouthful
of shirt in such circumstances as he was a mouthful of porridge.
Probably they learn how to do it. It must be funny to watch, though, and
I’d pay money to see it.
Mr. Kinderhook came down about half past eleven and sat down to smoke a
cigar about a foot long with a gold bellyband around it that was so
shiny it glittered when the sun shone on it. He spoke to us like he
always spoke to everybody he met—kind of oily-like and polite.
“Good morning, my little men,” says he. “Why aren’t you playing marbles
this fine morning?”
That’s what he said! Just like that! Little men, says he, and marbles.
Anybody knows boys don’t play marbles at that time of the year, and if I
was big enough I’d lick anybody that called me “little man.” We had a
Sunday-school superintendent once that always said that, and he was so
unpopular that he quit being superintendent after a couple of weeks, on
account of sitting down on a hornet that was tied in his chair with a
piece of thread. It irritates a hornet to be tied with thread, and this
one was about the maddest hornet you ever saw. He figured the
superintendent was the one that tied him, I guess, but he wasn’t. I know
who was, but I ain’t going to tell.
But we didn’t say anything to Kinderhook about what we thought. Catty
says good morning as polite as could be, and then he says: “We come to
talk to you about buyin’ some churn stock, mister. You’re goin’ to make
everybody rich, and we sort of figgered we’d like to be rich, too. Kin
we buy some?”
“If you’ve got the money,” says Mr. Kinderhook, and he winked at a man
next to him.
“We got it,” says Catty, talking as foolish as one of the Ramsay twins
that haven’t been just right since they fell off the roof of the barn
together. “We got ’most a dollar—but we hain’t goin’ to risk it till
we’re sure of gittin’ rich. No, sirree! We hain’t buyin’ nothin’ without
seein’ it. We want to make money, but we don’t want to lose all we’ve
worked for and saved up.... I’m scairt of churns, because once I knew
some folks that bought a new-fangled one and it wouldn’t churn nothin’.”
“You needn’t worry, my young friend. My churn will churn,” says
Kinderhook.
“Kin I see it?” says Catty.
“Young man,” says Kinderhook, real impressive, “nobody’s allowed to see
that churn. It is a secret, and if the secret of it was stolen the trust
would make churns like it and we wouldn’t make any money. Do you
understand that?”
“I calc’late to,” says Catty, “but if I was investin’ my money I
wouldn’t be apt to tell nobody what I seen so that I’ll lose all I put
in, would I?”
“I wouldn’t think so,” says Kinderhook, with another wink, “and some day
I’ll show it to you.”
“Have you got it here?” says Catty.
“You bet I have,” says Kinderhook.
“Right in the hotel?” says Catty.
“Right where I can keep my eye on it day and night,” says Kinderhook.
“When kin I see it, then?”
“Oh, some day pretty soon, when the brooks flow uphill, you come around,
and I’ll take you up to my room and let you look it over.”
“I won’t put in a cent till I see it,” says Catty, and Kinderhook
laughed and slapped his knee. “I’m not asking anybody to invest,” says
he, “but folks around here seem to be mighty anxious to buy some stock,
just the same.”
“Come on,” says Catty to me. “We’ll be back,” says he to Kinderhook,
“but mind, we won’t put in a cent till we see the churn.” As we went
down the street Catty says: “There, that’s somethin’. We know he keeps
it in his room, and we’ve got to figger to git a look at it.”
“How?” says I.
“That’s what we got to figger out,” says he.