“Bet he hain’t. He don’t look reformed,” says Catty. “If he was the kind of man that was willin’ to make money sellin’ cheat medicine to old women with the rheumatiz that wouldn’t help ’em a bit and maybe made ’em worse, why, he’s bad yet. But I can’t see how he’s plannin’ to be bad.”
“It’s sure he hain’t tryin’ to sell any shares in his factory.”
“Looks that way,” says Catty. “’Course he sold some to Captain Winton.”
“But not to anybody else, and everybody is crazy to buy.”
“I heard him say this mornin’ that his company was all incorporated, whatever that is, and he expected to start in buildin’ soon,” says Catty. “I wonder what ‘incorporated’ is?”
“Haven’t any idee,” says I. “Maybe it means somethin’ like planned out.”
“Maybe. I heard him tell Mr. Gage that he didn’t have any patent on this churn of his, because if he was to patent it he would have to give away the secret and somebody would sell it. He says there’s a secret part, and nobody kin find out how to make it, so he hain’t goin’ to git a patent at all, but just go to work and manufacture and prevent anybody from findin’ out how it’s done.”
“Sounds kind of fishy,” says I. “Everybody swallers it down,” says Catty, “but if there’s any cheatin’ in this I’ll bet it’s got somethin’ to do with that secret.” That very afternoon we didn’t have anything else to do, so we fussed around close to Mr. Kinderhook, keeping watch of him and listening to what he had to say. After a while he got up and walked down the street, and we trailed after him until he got to the station. He went into the telegraph-office and wrote out a message. We waited till he was gone and then we went right in where Tom Purvis was clicking the keys. We could do that because I knew Tom mighty well and he didn’t mind. We stood right back of Tom’s chair, making believe we were interested in what he was doing and how he sent messages, but really we wanted to get a sight of what Mr. Kinderhook had written. Pretty soon Tom came to it and began clacking away. I could read it over his shoulders. It was addressed to a man by the name of Matthew Binger in New York, and it said:
Come at once. Crop ripe.
Now that was a funny message, it seemed to me, because there weren’t any crops ripe just then, and Mr. Kinderhook wasn’t interested in crops if they had been. Catty and I went off after that, but we couldn’t make any head nor tail of it. It just looked silly, but anyhow we made up our minds we would keep meeting trains till this man Binger came, and we would see what he was up to and what crop Mr. Kinderhook had in mind.