It wasn’t the last we heard of that scrap, by a long sight, but on the whole I guess it did Catty more good than it did harm. It made him some friends, and if it made his enemies madder than ever, why, what of it? They were about as mean to him as they could be before, and a little more trouble stirred up couldn’t hardly be noticed. I will say that a good many folks in town took sides with Mrs. Gage, and there was lots of talk, and some of them really tried to get together enough influence to have Catty sent to the Reform School because he was a dangerous character. But my father got together with Captain Winton and Mr. Wade, and they backed Catty up like good ones, so that nothing came of it. But one thing did come and that was that Banty and Skoodles didn’t call any more names to Catty when he could hear them. But somebody did sneak around at night and tack a sign on their store with “Tramp” printed on it in big letters, and every day, almost, Catty or his father would get a post-card with nothing on it but just “Tramp—git out of town.”
We made up our minds that it was Skoodles and Banty doing this, and I says to Catty that we’d better get our heads together to make them quit. At first Catty wasn’t going to pay any attention, but after a day or so he got pretty mad.
“Guess we better do somethin’,” says he. “I don’t care so much, but it hain’t right I should stand it. I got to stand up for myself and make folks respect me and Dad. If I don’t make them, why, they’ll jest go on not respectin’ us. The way to git folks respectful is to make them that way—fix it so they know if that hain’t respectful somethin’ onpleasant ’ll happen quick.”
“What ’ll we do?” says I.
“I dunno,” says he. “It ’ll take some thinkin’, but, whatever it is, it’s got to make ’em look ridic’lous. It’s got to make everybody give ’em the laugh.”
“That’s the idee,” says I, but I hadn’t any more notion than a rabbit what it was we could do to make folks laugh at them. Catty he set to work thinking it over between-times when we weren’t busy following around after Mr. Kinderhook. Of course, he came first and we had to look after him before we took up any other kind of work, but there was times when we were waiting or something, and then Catty figured on a scheme to upset Banty’s apple-cart.
Another thing we did when we were waiting was to study—at least Catty studied. It wasn’t spelling or arithmetic, either, but a book that was called Decorum, and it was all about how to act. It told you how to act if you met a lady on the street, and how to act if you called on the minister, and what to do if somebody spilled soup on your pants, and which hand to take off your hat with, and all about how to eat, and that sort of thing. It was a most particular kind of a book, and it knew just exactly how a fellow ought to act no matter where he was or what he was doing. I never read it all through, but I’ll bet it told you the polite thing to say to a man with long whiskers driving a runaway sorrel horse in a northerly direction on a Thursday afternoon if you had a cold in your nose. I didn’t care about those things much, but Catty was so bent on being respectable that he didn’t miss a word of it, and most of it he learned by heart and then recited to his father, evenings.
Yes, sir, by the time Catty got through with that book you couldn’t have fooled him any place. He knew how to act if the President of the United States stepped on his sore toe, and what to say if a middle-aged schoolteacher with a wig was to have it blow off in his face. He knew just how a man ought to act if a lady he didn’t know offered him a piece of pie, and what he ought to say if a perfect stranger had a conniption fit in front of the band-stand on the Fourth of July. The amount of information in that book was enough to surprise an owl, but what anybody was going to do with all of it I couldn’t see. But Catty could, and he practised it. I had to make believe I was all sorts of folks in all sorts of places so he could tip his hat to me, or ask how my pulse was beating, or how come I didn’t paint out the freckles on my nose. I got so I could be anybody in a second. Catty would tell me I was a young woman that just lost her rubber in the mud—and I would be it. I have been his grandmother and his aunt and the minister’s wife and a pair of twins and a senator and the coachman. I’ve been two men or a crowd, and I’ve been a sewing society and the actors in a play. I’ll bet I could be a wall-eyed moon calf with his head where his tail ought to be if he would give me half a second to get in the right frame of mind. It was a great book, I’ll tell you, and we had lots of fun with it; at least I did, but Catty took it serious. I’ll bet there was never anybody so chock full of decorum as he was. It oozed out of his ears.
It took all that trouble to be respectable. I began to feel as if I wasn’t so very dog-gone respectable myself, but it didn’t hurt near so bad as the earache. If it took all that study and practice to be respectable, I made up my mind I would as soon be something else—red-headed, say, or tongue-tied, or a clown in a circus, or an acrobat. You could be a clown or an acrobat without half so much study—and make money with it, to say nothing about the fun you’d have. I’d rather be a first-class bareback rider than as respectable as the fellow that wrote the book. But Catty wouldn’t—and everybody to his taste, as the boy said when he saw his uncle kiss a pig.
It got so poor Mr. Atkins almost starved to death because he was afraid to eat. Every time he grabbed a spoon or a knife or a fork Catty was right after him, reciting out of the book and making him do it all over in just the exact way the book said. I felt pretty sorry for him, but Catty said it was for his good and he had to be ready to mingle in good society as soon as he got to be as respectable as he could and had the money to buy a silk hat.