“Yes,” says he.
“Then he was a cheat,” says I.
“To be sure,” says he. “A cheat. I calc’late that’s what he was—and maybe worse. How’d you look at sich a feller—as bein’ what Catty calls respectable, or not?”
“Not,” says I.
“Um!... My way of thinkin’, too. If you seen sich a feller runnin’ some other business and aimin’ to get aholt of folks’s money, what would your notions be about how he was goin’ to treat ’em?”
“I’d guess,” says I, “that he was goin’ to cheat ’em, too.”
“My idee,” says Mr. Atkins, and he went into the back room and stirred around for half an hour without saying another word. Catty and I talked about lots of things and told what we was going to do when we got rich and grown up and all that. Catty was going to own some kind of a business that was the most respectable business there was in the world. He hadn’t picked out what the business would be yet, because he couldn’t figure what was the most respectable. I told him being a minister looked awful respectable to me, but he says that wasn’t a business, but only marrying folks on week-days and talking on Sundays, and that there wasn’t any money in it, anyhow, so far as he could see. He thought some about being a judge or a Senator. I didn’t care for either of those ways of earning a living, myself. My leaning was toward something better than either of them. I aimed to be a clown in a circus or else a cowboy and discover a gold-mine and all that. I’d changed my mind some. Once I was going to be a circus performer—one of the trapeze kind—and I set some angleworms to stewing on top of the barn. Everybody knows circus fellers git so supple by rubbing angleworm oil onto themselves. But when my worms was stewed out and I went anywheres near them I made up my mind I didn’t care about trapeze-performing if I had to butter myself with that kind of perfume.
Just when we were arguing hardest Mr. Atkins came back and says, sudden as a thunderclap:
“This here Kinderhook man used to run one of them snide medicine-shows. Wore a silk hat and pulled teeth and had tame Injuns and all.”
You could have knocked me down with a puff-ball. Why, this Kinderhook man looked as if he’d never owned anything less than a national bank, and he was the kind of a fellow that you would pick to be the boss deacon of a church and all that. And him pulling teeth and selling snide medicine!