Well, by night it was all over town that the churn trust had offered Mr. Kinderhook fifty thousand dollars just for his secret because they were afraid of his churn. Folks were saying that if the churn trust thought it was worth fifty thousand dollars just to stop it from being manufactured, why, it would be worth millions to go ahead and sell such churns. Everybody was talking about it and everybody was crazier than ever to get a chance to buy some of the stock. CHAPTER XV I don’t know whether I told what a great whittler Mr. Atkins was, and how, every spare minute, he was making some kind of a contraption with his jack-knife and maybe a piece of wire or something. He didn’t just whittle out chains, or balls in cages, and things like that, but he always made _something_. I mean something that was like something folks could use. He kind of invented things that way. If he saw something somewhere that didn’t just work to suit him, he would go home and whittle one out and fix it up so it _would_ work. I remember one thing was a folding-table—like a card-table or a sewing-table. He bought one for the shop, and pinched his fingers in it. It made him mad. “By Jing!” he said. “I’m a-goin’ to whittle me out one that ’ll be a heap sight better ’n that. I’ll do it jest to show it kin be done.” That was his notion. He’d whittle out things just to prove to himself that he could improve ’em, or make ’em work, and that was all there was to it. When he had them done he would mostly throw them away or give them to Catty and me. He fixed up a game for us one rainy day. Made it out of wood and some old fish-net, and sawed round disks out of a broom-handle to play it with. I never saw anything like it, but it was a dandy game. He was just amusing himself and not trying to invent anything at all, and none of us thought much about it, except that we knew he certainly could whittle. That little folding-table he made was a dandy. The legs folded under, and when you set it up it stood as solid as a rock. I said right off that I bet a lot of folks would like to have tables like that, and Mr. Atkins he said he didn’t know how they was to git ’em, because that was the only one there was and nobody but him knew how to make it. He wasn’t a bit interested, and I didn’t see any special reason why he should be—then. It was the day he whittled the little table that Jack Phillips fell off a load of brick and sprained his ankle bad and had to stay in bed with it. It was a bad time, because the houses were just getting started, and laborers were on the job—and right on top of that a big lumber firm wrote that they couldn’t get a shipment of lumber through for three weeks, on account of a strike or something.