That evening the town was all upset.

Folks had bought lots to build houses on, and there had been some houses built besides those Atkins & Phillips were working on, and it looked as if there would be bad times. The new factory wouldn’t ever be built and all the new people wouldn’t move in, and whatever would become of those houses? Nobody would live in them, and they would be pretty close to a dead loss. Everybody felt pretty blue, I can tell you, in spite of their saving the money, they would have paid to Kinderhook.... And that’s how things stood the next day when Mr. Sommers went up to Atkins & Phillips’s shop.

Catty was there alone when Mr. Sommers and I stepped in, and they shook hands.

“The patents are fixed up all right,” says Mr. Sommers. “Where’s your father? Does he know anything about it yet?”

“He doesn’t know a thing, and I don’t know much,” says Catty, with a grin. “You know I haven’t any idee at all what you got in mind.”

“Well, call in your father, and we’ll have a little talk,” says Mr. Sommers.

Mr. Atkins came in and was introduced. He looked kind of surprised, and a lot more so when Mr. Sommers unwrapped the little toy-table Catty’s father had whittled out.

“I understand you made this,” says he. “Whittled her out,” says Mr. Atkins.

“Consider it worth anything?”

“Never figgered it so. Made it for fun.”

“Sell it to me for five dollars?”

Mr. Atkins opened up his eyes. “Sure!” says he.

“With all your rights in it?”

“Sure! Why not? Nothin’ but a kind of a sort of a toy. Whittled it out, I tell you.”

“I’m in the furniture business,” says Mr. Sommers.

“Pleased to hear it,” says Mr. Atkins, as polite as pie.

“So you’d sell this for five dollars, eh?”

“Didn’t cost me five cents to make.”

“How about you, Catty? Would you sell it for five dollars?”

“No, sir.”

“How much would you sell it for?”

“I hain’t got no idee. I calculate I’d ask you what it was really worth, and then I’d sell it for that.”

“You’d take my word for it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Why?”

“I dunno, Mr. Sommers, but I would. You kin tell. You kin always tell.”

“If you can,” says Mr. Sommers, “you have a gift that is worth a great deal of money.... But you’re right about one thing; you shouldn’t sell for five dollars.”

“I’ll be blowed!” says Mr. Atkins.

“And you’d be right if you said you wouldn’t sell at all.”

“I’ll be blowed ag’in!” says Mr. Atkins.

“Would you like to listen to a proposition from me, Mr. Atkins?”

“I’d enjoy it. I kind of like to hear you talk.”

“This table is very ingenious. There isn’t a folding-table half as good in the country. That game you invented for the boys is a daisy. Four or five of those other things you whittled out are practical and would appeal to the public. If they were to be made of a regular size, instead of as toys, there should be a great deal of money in them.”

“I’d be willin’ to git some of it out, says Mr. Atkins.

“Which is exactly what we’re going to do. Your son and I have patented a few of these things in your name. You seem to have a most ingenious mind, Mr. Atkins. If you had nothing else to bother you, there is no doubt you could whittle out a number of very useful and salable things.”

“What d’you think of that?” says Mr. Atkins.

“In short, you are a very valuable man to a business such as I have in mind, and I want to make you a proposition.”

“Make her,” says Mr. Atkins.

“I have had one of my best salesmen show this table and game to the trade. This seems somewhat incredible, but in ten days’ time he had taken enough definite orders for them from wholesale houses to keep a fair-sized factory busy. When we really work the trade we can keep busy a mighty large-sized factory.”

“I swan to man!” says Mr. Atkins.

“I have called in novelty experts and woodenware manufacturers and I have found what these tables can be made for. They will cost about a dollar twenty to make. They sell at retail for three and a half. A factory could make a profit of at least a dollar on each table—and, Mr. Atkins, we have signed orders for more than five hundred dozens right now.”

“For six thousand of them tables!”

“Yes, sir. And more orders for hundreds of those games. At the rate of business, I believe we can sell five or six thousand dozen tables and possibly five thousand games a year, to speak never a word of the other devices. It will be a very considerable business, and I want to propose that we go into it together.”

“I’m willin’,” says Mr. Atkins.

“I will build the factory, and have been looking around for a site. There seems to be a good one here—with some houses already built to accommodate the hands. There is timber handy.... Now, then, I guess we can locate here without difficulty. Do you approve of that?”

“We wouldn’t move anywheres else,” says Catty.

“Very well, then. I will arrange for the money to build and equip the mill, and to do business on. I will give you one quarter of the stock for the right to use all the devices you invent while our agreement lasts, and, besides, I will, or our company will, pay you a royalty on each article sold. For instance, we will pay you, say, fifteen cents for each table, which, in case we sell fifty thousand of them, would be seventy-five hundred dollars a year. How is that? We would want you to have a workshop in the plant and do nothing but invent novelties all day—”

“I think up things while I’m fishin’,” says Mr. Atkins.

“Then we’ll furnish you with the best fishing outfit in the country, and you can fish all you like.... Of course, you’ll want some salary for a while till the thing gets to going and your royalties come in ... so we can offer you five thousand dollars for the first year—after that your royalties.”

“Sufferin’ mackerel!” says Mr. Atkins. “You mean it? Honest Injun—no jokin’?”

“We mean it. We will call the concern the Atkins Novelty Mills, and if things go as they ought to, you ought to be a very comfortably wealthy man in a few years. We shall incorporate for two hundred thousand dollars, so your stock alone, if we have any sort of luck, will be worth forty thousand.”

“Don’t seem possible,” says Mr. Atkins, so flabbergasted he could hardly speak.

“And, using your name in the company, you will be its vice-president. How’s that, Catty? Sound all right?”

“Sounds good and respectable,” says Catty, who was so tickled and excited he could hardly wiggle. “My goodness! Dad ’ll be makin’ more money than any man in town, won’t he?”

“A lot more.”

“More than Captain Winton?”

“I should say so.”

Catty waggled his head. “Respectable at last,” says he.

It would surprise you how quick that factory was built and in running order, and I guess it surprised even Mr. Sommers how quick it got to making money. Why, they couldn’t commence to manufacture things as quick as folks ordered them all over the United States, and before the first factory was finished they were building additions on to it and starting to make new things. It was a go. Mr. Sommers said it was a gold-mine—and a fifth of it all belonged to Mr. Atkins, besides his royalties and salary. Why, he was rich right off ... and respectable!

The way folks changed toward him and Catty was funny. Everybody but Mrs. Gage. She kept right on hating him like everything, but I guess she was sorry she had to. Other folks thought Mr. Atkins was the greatest man in the world, even bigger than Captain Winton. In a little while they built them a dandy house and kept a cook and another girl to clean up, and they was as swell as anybody in the country. And Catty made his father buy a silk hat and a swallow-tail coat for Sundays.

Mr. Atkins didn’t care a cent about the money or the style, but Catty set an awful store about their being so respectable. But Mr. Atkins was as happy as could be. He had a fine workshop at the mill with all kinds of tools, and he jest whittled and tinkered all day long, and when he didn’t want to tinker there, why, he went off fishing and whittled on the bank of the river. But he wasn’t a man anybody tried to fool more than once. Some tried it that many times, and then quit prompt. He said he had found just what he wanted to do in life and the thing he could do best, and anybody that knew a thing agreed with him.

“But,” says he, “I’d still be a tramp without anythin’ in the world if it wasn’t for Catty. He grabbed me and made me over from the soles of my feet to the tiptop hair of my head. He’s the real man in our family.”

They didn’t give up Atkins & Phillips’s, but kept it up as a contracting concern, with Jack Phillips as boss, and that made a lot of money. Seemed like everything made money for the Atkinses.... And there you are. Catty started in to school, and it was funny to see how few objected to their children going to the same school with him.

He never changed a bit, and we chum around together just like we always did, and we’re always a-going to. The other day he says to me: “Wee-wee, it’s a whale of a job to git to be respectable in the first place, but I got an idee it’s consid’rable of a task to keep that way. You got to plug at it all the time.” ... And so he was always at his Dad just like before, until he got poor Mr. Atkins so he talked like a college perfessor and looked like a senator, and even then he wasn’t satisfied.

“I aim to make Dad the biggest man in the United States,” says he, and I’m hanged if I don’t believe he’ll do it. I wouldn’t be a mite surprised if that kid didn’t make his Dad President.

Well, I hope he does, and then I kin go and visit in the White House. I’ll bet Catty and me could have a lot of fun playing tricks on all the senators.