The way folks changed toward him and Catty was funny. Everybody but Mrs. Gage. She kept right on hating him like everything, but I guess she was sorry she had to. Other folks thought Mr. Atkins was the greatest man in the world, even bigger than Captain Winton. In a little while they built them a dandy house and kept a cook and another girl to clean up, and they was as swell as anybody in the country. And Catty made his father buy a silk hat and a swallow-tail coat for Sundays.
Mr. Atkins didn’t care a cent about the money or the style, but Catty set an awful store about their being so respectable. But Mr. Atkins was as happy as could be. He had a fine workshop at the mill with all kinds of tools, and he jest whittled and tinkered all day long, and when he didn’t want to tinker there, why, he went off fishing and whittled on the bank of the river. But he wasn’t a man anybody tried to fool more than once. Some tried it that many times, and then quit prompt. He said he had found just what he wanted to do in life and the thing he could do best, and anybody that knew a thing agreed with him.
“But,” says he, “I’d still be a tramp without anythin’ in the world if it wasn’t for Catty. He grabbed me and made me over from the soles of my feet to the tiptop hair of my head. He’s the real man in our family.”
They didn’t give up Atkins & Phillips’s, but kept it up as a contracting concern, with Jack Phillips as boss, and that made a lot of money. Seemed like everything made money for the Atkinses.... And there you are. Catty started in to school, and it was funny to see how few objected to their children going to the same school with him.
He never changed a bit, and we chum around together just like we always did, and we’re always a-going to. The other day he says to me: “Wee-wee, it’s a whale of a job to git to be respectable in the first place, but I got an idee it’s consid’rable of a task to keep that way. You got to plug at it all the time.” ... And so he was always at his Dad just like before, until he got poor Mr. Atkins so he talked like a college perfessor and looked like a senator, and even then he wasn’t satisfied.
“I aim to make Dad the biggest man in the United States,” says he, and I’m hanged if I don’t believe he’ll do it. I wouldn’t be a mite surprised if that kid didn’t make his Dad President.
Well, I hope he does, and then I kin go and visit in the White House. I’ll bet Catty and me could have a lot of fun playing tricks on all the senators.