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.” CHAPTER XXIV That evening the town was all upset.