“Maybe he kin work cheaper ’n you.”
“He can’t.”
“Wa-al,” says I, “you ought to do something or other, hadn’t you?”
“Calc’latin’ to,” says he.
“What?” says I.
“Dunno—yet,” says he, “but I’m goin’ to figger it out. There is some way to beat Bockers at this here game, and if there is it kin be found, and if it kin be found, why, I kin find it if I figger hard enough.”
That was the way Catty always went at things. He started by believing it was possible to do anything. Then he said to himself that if it was possible for somebody to do it, why, it was possible for him to do it, and if it was possible for him then there wasn’t anything left to do but just go ahead and do it. He was the determinedest kid I ever saw. Never seemed to git discouraged, and with all his working and figuring he always had time to learn something new about being respectable.
There wasn’t a day he didn’t pick up something brand-new about manners, or about how to wear your necktie, or about what folks that was thought well of by everybody did. He was always watching, and he made his father’s meal-times miserable by teaching him what he had learned and making him quit eating pie with his knife and wiping his mouth on his sleeve, and such. Poor Mr. Atkins got so he was afraid to move at the table till Catty explained to him how it ought to be done. Once in a while he complained.
“Catty,” says he, as doleful as a funeral, “you’re a-goin’ to starve your Dad to death. With all these manners I’m plumb losin’ my appetite. I’m scared. Every time I take a bite I’m all excited for fear I hain’t bit it according to the way the first families do their bitin’.”
“Stick to it, Dad,” says Catty. “I’m learnin’, too. After a while it ’ll git to be a habit to eat right, and you won’t notice it. It ’ll come natural.”