“So’s mine. If they have the nerve to make a bid, why, we’ll just throw it out.”
I told this to Catty and he grinned a little and then squared up his jaw. In a day or two there was an advertisement for plans and bids in the paper, and Jack went over to Harleyville. He had been working on plans and specifications, and he had had letter-paper printed with “North American Construction Company” on it. He signed his letters that way, with only an initial “P” under it in pen and ink. They were fine letters, too, and guaranteed the kind of work that would be done—and it would be the best work, Jack said. He said he wanted Atkins & Phillips to get to be known everywhere as a firm that did better work than anybody else and always did what it guaranteed to do.
Atkins & Phillips didn’t make any bid at all. Mr. Wade was appointed by the North American Construction Company to be its agent in town, and it gave him quite a reputation, because the name sounded as if it was a whopping big company. Mr. Wade knew all about it, and the way he laughed was enough to make your sides ache. He said it was regular Napoleon tactics, fooling the enemy and hitting them hard where they weren’t looking for it. He got right on the job and kept after Captain Winton, who wouldn’t care himself who got the job, and he kept after Mr. Gage and Mr. Bockers, until they thought the North American Construction Company was about right. He said the company would put up a bond to do the work right.
There were three other bids from out-of-town companies, but between Jack’s letters and Mr. Wade the North American landed the job and the contracts were signed by Captain Winton, president of the building company, and by Mr. Wade as agent for the North American, and the bond was made and everything. Nobody said a word, and then the lumber began to come and carpenters from out of town—and the work started.
Well, maybe you think there wasn’t a row then when folks found out Jack Phillips was in charge of the job and Mr. Atkins was a kind of foreman, and that the whole work was actually being done by Atkins & Phillips. Mr. Gage got a lawyer and Bockers got one and they tried every which way to break the contract, but it was no go. Captain Winton sort of grinned and wouldn’t have anything to do with it. He said if the Atkins folks were smart enough to get the contract he guessed they were smart enough to carry it out, and he told them to come to the bank if they needed any money—which they did.
It was right after this that Catty made his father go to the clothing-store and buy two suits of clothes, one for business and one for Sundays, and the right kind of hats to go with them. Well, sir, when Mr. Atkins got dressed up in those duds you wouldn’t have known him, and I guess he hardly knew himself. He kept his hair cut now, and his beard trimmed down into a point, and if he wasn’t as good-looking a man as we had in town, I’ll eat him. He didn’t look any more like a tramp than Mr. Rockefeller did.
Those clothes seemed to make quite a difference in him, too. He acted different. He didn’t act so much like Mr. Atkins any more, but like another man that wasn’t shiftless at all and really liked to work. That is, he acted that way part of the time, and when he was feeling shiftless he sort of kept out of sight so folks wouldn’t see it. Catty said his father was really getting interested in the work, and he was hoping he would get interested in being respectable.
From that day nobody ever saw Mr. Atkins in any clothes but good ones. He didn’t wear his painter’s suit, though he wanted to. Catty wouldn’t let him. Every morning before Mr. Atkins could get out of his room Catty looked him all over to see he was dressed right. It was funny. It was almost as if Catty had taken a jack-knife and whittled out a man, his father was getting to be so different to what he used to be.
Catty and I began trailing around after Mr. Kinderhook whenever we got a chance, but we hadn’t even seen anything that looked suspicious. He just looked rich and important, and he acted rich and important and puffed up. To see him sitting on the hotel porch like he owned the whole state, and being kind to folks and behaving toward them just like he thought they were as good as he was, was a sight. He never talked about his factory and what he was going to manufacture unless somebody started it first and then urged him on, and then he acted sort of like the subject tired him and he didn’t want to be bothered with it. We listened to him a dozen times, and couldn’t see how he was planning to gouge anybody.
“Maybe he’s reformed,” says I.