“It’s changed my feelin’s a heap,” says he.
Mr. Wade started to take Kinderhook down off of the band-stand, but just as he got to the bottom Kinderhook busted away and started to scoot. He was big and fat and dignified, but he run that time if he never run before, and about a thousand boys and folks chasing him. He didn’t know which way he was running—all he had in his mind was to get away from there quick.
Well, he made toward the railroad station and there was a freight going through pretty fast. Kinderhook made for it regardless, with the whole dog-gone town right on his heels, and he got there just in time to make a whale of a jump for the tail-end of the last car. He caught the handle and hung on, and it was as funny a sight as I ever saw. The train jerked him off his feet and he waved out behind like a flag. It looked like he’d have to keep on waving or drop, but somehow he managed to get his legs down and slipped and floundered around, but after a while he got a holt on the ladder and climbed up and sprawled on the roof. Then the freight went around a curve and that was the last we ever saw of him. He didn’t look half so rich and dignified a-fluttering off of the end of that train as he did when he was sitting on the porch of the hotel.
That was about the most exciting thing that ever happened in our time and it was enjoyed by all.
Catty and I walked back, and we felt pretty pleased with everything. The only worry Catty had was about his father forgetting what fork to use when he got to Captain Winton’s, and he wanted to find his Dad to give him a kind of final examination before they sat down at the table, but by that time there was about a hundred folks gathered around him, shaking hands with him and making a lot of fuss. They had begun to realize what he had done for them, and he’d got to be a regular hero. But he just grinned at them and didn’t say anything special, only once in a while he’d drop a remark about his being just the same feller he was the day before, and that he guessed he wouldn’t ever do such a thing as save folks’ money again, because it made such a lot of trouble and got him invited to a place where they had forks and spoons that maybe he hadn’t read about in the decorum book. He said he didn’t know what would happen if they set a newfangled fork down in front of him that he didn’t know how to manage, and that, anyhow, he would rather have a ham sandwich, because you could eat that without any forks at all.
There was a time when folks wouldn’t have thought he was funny at all—only ignorant and shiftless, but now he was funny. He was awful funny, and every time he opened his mouth folks would get ready to laugh. That’s the way folks are, I guess. Just let somebody get to be a great man all in a minute, or become prominent or rich or something, and the very things they’ve been objecting to in him before are the things they make a fuss over now. Folks is funny.
Catty and his father went up to Captain Winton’s to dinner, and I wished I was invited, too, but I wasn’t, so I just hung around town, waiting for Catty to come out. And it was then that I saw a man get off the evening train, and the man was Mr. Sommers, of the big furniture-store in the city. The one that had been all het up over Mr. Atkins’s folding-table. I went right up to him and told him what had happened, and he said he would go to the hotel and wait till morning to see Catty and Mr. Atkins.
“I’ve got a proposition to make them,” says he, “and I bet they accept it.”
“Will it make ’em respectable?” says I. “It ’ll make them so respectable,” says he, “that they won’t know themselves.”
“That,” says I, “is what Catty wants more ’n anything else.”