Catty Atkins

I could hardly wait for breakfast to be over in the morning so that I could hunt up Catty Atkins and find out just exactly what had happened. I told Dad about it, but he didn’t...

“Now let’s see,” says Catty on Sunday afternoon while we were sitting under a tree down by the bayou. “I guess everything’s ready for to-morrow. We got our paints on credit; we...

Just on the edge of town was a big stock-farm where a company raised Holstein cattle. There were half a dozen big barns—bigger than any barns in our county, all painted white. E...

It seemed like the town got more and more excited every day about Arthur Peabody Kinderhook and his factory. Nobody talked about much of anything else, and every afternoon you c...

A day or two after that Catty and I were sitting on the platform of the station, waiting for the train to come in with some things Jack Phillips had ordered. Along came Captain...

“Dad,” said Catty, after Jim Bockers had been in business a week or so, and had got about all the business there was going just by waiting till Catty and his father made a price...

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...

He was up, and when I got there he was talking business to his father, who had a streak to want to go fishing that morning. Mr. Atkins said he was worked out and so respectable...

On the first of the month Catty and his father moved into the little store; all the profits they made out of the warehouse-painting job went into furniture and stock for the sto...

It was the day after we got back from the city that Catty and I were walking along the street toward the hotel on a sort of a still hunt for Arthur Peabody Kinderhook, when Bant...

The folks in our town were going to have an Old Home Day, when everybody that used to live there and had moved away were coming home. There was going to be a celebration, with s...

Catty had the rest of Thursday and Friday, Saturday, and Sunday to get together the things he had to have to paint Mr. Manning’s warehouse—and to convince his father he had to g...

We kept going till we got to one of the biggest stores in town. It was a furniture-store, and it looked big enough to hold furniture enough to fill every house in the state. Cat...

Next morning bright and early I hustled down to the shanty where Catty and his father were staying. Mr. Atkins was sitting on his log, fishing for pickerel and looking pretty so...

“Fire company’s got some,” says I. “New hook-and-ladder was bought this spring.” Catty thought it over awhile. “Don’t b’lieve we could borrow them,” says he. “Them fire companie...

During the next week Catty got more than twenty churn catalogues, and the way we studied them you would have thought we were trying to pass some kind of an examination. Every sp...

The band was playing when we got there, and the crowds were packed about the grand-stand, and Kinderhook was sitting up there with his silk hat on and the red, white, and blue c...

We drove home as fast as we could and hustled the churn into Atkins & Phillips’s store. Jack was in the other room working on some drawings, and he came in to see what the racke...

That afternoon about four o’clock the paper came out, and right on the front page of it was a big piece about Sands Jones and Darkie Patt and the painting-race. Mr. Cuppy had do...

It was a day or two afterward that I run across Catty Atkins poking along the road on the edge of town, all alone. I hollered to him and he stopped.

I put a bottle on a box against the side of the barn and aimed as careful as all-git-out. My idea was to bust it right at the neck. Well, I jerked on the trigger and the gun wen...

Catty was pretty quiet all the afternoon. He seemed to be figuring something out, and every little while he acted as if he had forgotten I was around at all, and would sit down...

We drove along at a pretty good clip for two or three miles and no ideas occurred to us. We knew we had to do something before we got to Litchfield, but when it came to doing it...

Folks had bought lots to build houses on, and there had been some houses built besides those Atkins & Phillips were working on, and it looked as if there would be bad times. The...