Catty looked worried, because he figured maybe his father had got frightened or something, and, anyhow, Catty was the kind that had to oversee things. If he was in anything he had to see to it personal that it went off all right, and if he didn’t have his fingers on everything that was mixed up with it he sort of worried for fear it would go wrong.
But he wouldn’t have hurt his father’s feelings for a lot, and if he thought his father didn’t want him to go into the bedroom, he wouldn’t have gone if there never was any celebration, and if Mr. Atkins never did what it was planned for him to do.
We didn’t have more than ten minutes to wait, though, and then the door opened and we turned around. I thought I’d swaller my tongue. There was a man standing in the door that looked kind of familiar in a few spots, like his nose, but that didn’t look like anybody I ever seen before in any other spot. He was smooth-faced, without a whisker or a mustache or anything, and he was kind of handsome, too. Yes, sir, he was a mighty fine-looking man, with one of those kind of slender faces that look like the man that has them has got brains, too, and maybe is somebody. You know what I mean. You wouldn’t be surprised to hear he was anything. And he looked young. Why, this man looked younger than my Dad, and my Dad don’t look hardly old enough to be out of college. Come to find out, this man wasn’t forty yet. That’s the truth, and I always sort of thought he was maybe fifty.
But that wasn’t all. He had on clothes. Not just cloth that sort of covered him up, but clothes like you see on men that come from New York or Boston or some place. You could tell in a minute they was made on purpose for him and nobody else, and he had on a hat that was swell, and shoes, and his cuffs was just showing below his sleeves and there was a necktie tied like you see them in pictures, with a pin sticking in it. Say, I wouldn’t have been a bit surprised to hear this man was president of a college or a senator or ’most any kind of a man—but he wasn’t. He was Mr. Atkins, Catty’s father!
I looked at Catty, and Catty was looking at his father, and there were tears running down his cheeks. Honest, there was. I kind of blinked myself. Then Catty says kind of quiet, “Dad, honest Injun, is it you?”
“I calc’late it is, Catty,” says his father. “Dad,” says Catty, “I’m awful proud—awful proud. I always knowed I had the best Dad there was, but I never knowed till this minute that I had the best lookin’.”
“I hid my beauty under them whiskers,” says Mr. Atkins.
“And we was tramps,” says Catty to himself. “He was a tramp. Honest, he was a tramp.... But look at him now!” I don’t wonder Catty was flabbergasted, because I was kind of keeled over myself. There hain’t a bigger change between a cocoon and a butterfly than there was between the old Mr. Atkins and this new one—not that he was a butterfly, you understand, but the change was like that.
“Think I’ll look all right, eh?” says Mr. Atkins.
“Dad,” says Catty, “nobody ever looked as good as you do since King Solomon.”