It took all that trouble to be respectable. I began to feel as if I wasn’t so very dog-gone respectable myself, but it didn’t hurt near so bad as the earache. If it took all that study and practice to be respectable, I made up my mind I would as soon be something else—red-headed, say, or tongue-tied, or a clown in a circus, or an acrobat. You could be a clown or an acrobat without half so much study—and make money with it, to say nothing about the fun you’d have. I’d rather be a first-class bareback rider than as respectable as the fellow that wrote the book. But Catty wouldn’t—and everybody to his taste, as the boy said when he saw his uncle kiss a pig. It got so poor Mr. Atkins almost starved to death because he was afraid to eat. Every time he grabbed a spoon or a knife or a fork Catty was right after him, reciting out of the book and making him do it all over in just the exact way the book said. I felt pretty sorry for him, but Catty said it was for his good and he had to be ready to mingle in good society as soon as he got to be as respectable as he could and had the money to buy a silk hat. But that hasn’t anything to do with Mr. Kinderhook and his friend Binger, has it? Well, we thought we knew what Kinderhook had in mind, but we had to prove it. We had to get what lawyers call evidence so that everybody would believe us when we told them that instead of making them rich Kinderhook figured to smouge away every dollar that was put into his churn-factory. But it is a heap different to know a thing and to be able to prove it. You bet it is. After the fight we went to the hotel, and there was Mr. Kinderhook, as usual, sitting on the front porch with about a dozen folks around, admiring him and taffying him and acting like they thought he was the man that invented the sun and moon. He just sat there and took it, and once in a while he let out a remark that sounded awful wise. When he let off one of those remarks folks would waggle their heads and sit and try to remember just what he said and how he said it, so that they could repeat it afterward and make believe they had thought it up themselves. But I noticed that the conversation always got around to churns pretty quickly and to stock and to such-like things. Catty whispered to me that those folks were just ripe to pick and all Kinderhook had to do was shake the tree. He was letting go of more and more stock, or promising to. We kept hearing of somebody else he had promised to sell to, and it began to look like we would have to get a hustle on if we were going to save the bacon. But we weren’t getting any place at all. It was that night that Catty says to me: “Wee-wee, what we need is a plan of campaign. We’re jest nosin’ around, as it is, without any idee what we’re tryin’ to do. Now let’s git up a reg’lar scheme and stick to it.” “Go ahead,” says I. “You do the scheme and I’ll do the stickin’. I’m better at it.”