WHOSE PICKLES
“What’s luckier than the left-hand foot of a tongue-tied graveyard
rabbit?” says I to Poppy, when our “silent” partner had gone into the
house to eat his dinner.
I thought at first that old long-face wasn’t going to answer me, so
busy was he building shelves and counters in his mind. But finally it
percolated into his crowded cranium that I had asked him a question.
“What?” says he, deciding that shelf number six was a trifle too high
and that the wrapping counter needed to be shoved a thirty-second of an
inch to the left.
“A cat in a cistern,” says I.
“Cuckoo!” was his lack of appreciation of my cleverness.
“I’m not talking about ‘cuckoos,’” I threw back at him. “I’m talking
about cats--k-a-t-z, cats. And the point is, that if Mr. Weckler’s
tomcat hadn’t skidded into a convenient cistern, thus giving you a
chance to do the hero stuff, our Pickle Parlor might have cut its baby
teeth in a dry-goods box instead of a juvenile bungalow. Hence the
good luck to us, as I say. Oh, you needn’t look so disgusted,” I began
to spar at him, “or the first thing you know I’ll show you how easy a
vice-president can take a mere president down and rub dirt on the end
of his nose.”
“Shut up,” he laughed, “I’m busy.”
“Don’t take it so seriously, Poppy,” I further kept at him. “For this
isn’t a morgue--it’s a Pickle Parlor.”
“To listen to you,” was the nice little hunk of flattery that he shoved
at me, “anyone would think it was a lunatic asylum.”
I picked off some of his high-falutin’ oratory.
“Poppy’s petrified pickles,” I swept the air with my arms. “The perfect
pickles with a puckery past; the quicker you eat them the shorter you
last.” Then I let out a yip. “Look me over, kid,” I strutted around.
“I’m a real poet.”
“Yah, a poet ... but you don’t know it.”
“Say, Poppy?”
“Well, what now?”
“Have you got your private office picked out yet?”
“Sure thing,” he grinned. “It’s on the ninth floor.”
“Toot! Toot!” says I, pretending that I was an elevator. “Anybody
going up to the president’s office?” Then I took a lath that lay on the
floor and smacked old doo-funny a sharp crack on the seat of the pants.
“Look out!” I staggered, pretending this time that my arms were loaded
full. “I just dropped a jar of pickled carpet tacks.”
Poppy and I fool around that way a lot. It’s kid stuff, I know. And
kind of silly. But in a way it bears out that old saying of Dad’s:
Every day a little fun and a little business.
Having completed the entertainment, so to speak, I got down to
business, making the suggestion that we paint the outside of our
store yellow with green trimmings. The “yellow” would be the cucumber
blossoms, I brilliantly explained, and the “green” would be the
pickles. The inside was to be painted, too, but, of course, we couldn’t
do that until the shelves and counter had been made. Spick and span and
nothing else but--that was our idea of what a store should be. And it
was the right idea, too.
“How about a sign?” says I, as the self-appointed decorator. “Do you
want me to paint that, too?”
“What are we going to put on it?” says Poppy.
“‘Poppy’s Pickle Parlor,’ of course,” says I, looking at him in
surprise. “I thought that was all settled.”
“But it’s _your_ Pickle Parlor,” says he, “just as much as it’s mine.”
“Of course,” says I, getting the point of his unselfishness. “But
‘Poppy’s Pickle Parlor’ is a better name than ‘Jerry’s Pickle Parlor.’
For the ‘P’ in Poppy sort of rhymes with the ‘P’ in pickles.”
“Alliteration,” old brain-bag swung in.
“What do you mean by that?” I cheerfully showed my ignorance.
“Using the three words, all beginning with ‘P,’ is what is called
alliteration. You see a lot of it in advertising. In fact,” he
admitted, “that’s where I got my idea.”
Getting the measurements of our new store, which proved to be six feet
wide by eight feet long, we made a diagram, or, as Poppy called it, a
floor plan, a copy of which is printed on the opposite page. You may
wonder where we expected to pick off a cash register. As a matter of
fact, we didn’t expect to own a cash register for a long time. But a
floor plan, to use the leader’s words, was intended to show everything
_complete_. And that is why we put the cash register in ahead of time,
along with the two prospective pickle barrels.
“Before we go any farther,” says Poppy, “I think we better check up and
see how we stand on the money question. For it will take a good bit of
jack to pay for the paint and shelf lumber. Then, too, we’ll have to
hire a house mover.”
[Illustration]
“It won’t cost much,” I grinned, “to move this house.”
“Probably not. But we won’t get the job done for nothing. How about
putting in fifty dollars apiece?”
That was all right with me, I agreed. Then, as the lodge saying is,
we adjourned, stretching our legs in the direction of home, having
been reminded by the one o’clock factory whistles that we hadn’t had
dinner yet. Later we met in Mr. Thomas Lorring’s bank where we opened a
hundred-dollar checking account in the name of Poppy’s Pickle Parlor,
after which we ordered our lumber and paint, not forgetting to put an
ad in the _Tutter Daily Globe_.
Mr. Lorring, you will remember, was the banker who helped us start up
our stilt factory, out of which we made several hundred dollars. He
sure used us fine. And that is why we went back to him.
Poppy is a regular little gee whizz when it comes to sawing and
fitting. Boy, you should have seen the way those shelves danced into
place! I ran a race with him, slinging yellow and green paint right and
left, but he beat me by a mile. Still, if I could have added to the
paint that I put on the store what I got on the old overalls that Mr.
Weckler had so wisely provided, I guess the race would have been a tie.
Throughout our afternoon’s work the old man pottered here and there,
silently taking in everything with a critical, interested eye. Mrs.
Clayton, too, came out to see how we were getting along, bringing a
big pitcher of lemonade. Um-yum! The best lemonade I ever tasted.
Having lapped up two or three quarts, more or less, my painting speed
increased thirty-eight strokes to the minute.
People living in small towns usually keep pretty close tab on their
neighbors. So, after Poppy’s two wild “pickle” spiels, first in the
bank and again in front of the Parker grocery, it soon got noised about
that a new local business was about to blossom forth. A Pickle Parlor!
Kids who heard what we were doing came and rubbered at us over the
fence that inclosed Mr. Weckler’s neglected garden. And older friends
of ours smiled at us when they met us in the street. The general
opinion was, as I had told Poppy in the beginning, that such a store
would fizzle out for want of business. Of course, there was a “secret”
side to our plans that our friends didn’t know about. And, to that
point, I was to learn later on that my brainy partner had still other
dope in his head that he hadn’t dished out to me. Not for one instant
had it occurred to me that something bigger and better equipped than
an ordinary kitchen would be needed to cook the big wad of pickles
that we hoped to sell. But, as I say, old Poppy already had dreams of
a pickle factory in the back part of his mind. That kid! First it was
stilts and now it was pickles. I never saw the beat of him. And what is
more I never expect to.
At six o’clock we knocked off for the day, telling Mr. Weckler that we
would be back the first thing in the morning. Mother nearly had a cat
fit when she saw me. And no wonder! For so “stuck up” was I from my
painting job that it took me an hour to get the green and yellow paint
out of my hair. But what was that to upset a young business man!
At the first chance I got the evening newspaper away from Dad and
skimmed up and down the columns to find our ad. Here it is:
WHOSE PICKLES
Something of great value was found in a quart jar of cucumber pickles
purchased last Saturday at the Presbyterian missionary food sale in
Drake’s store.
Seven diamonds worth ten thousand dollars.
Were they _your_ pickles? It will pay you to find out. Address, Box
9, _Tutter Daily Globe_.
I read the ad a second time, hardly able to believe my eyes. Seven
diamonds worth ten thousand dollars! What in Sam Hill was Poppy’s
object in telling a lie like that? I had helped him write the ad; and
it was my understanding that the “something of great value” that had
been found in the pickles was the idea that my chum had of selling the
pickles in great quantities, which, of course, would bring riches to
the pickle maker. But there had been no mention of “diamonds” to me.
“Say, Jerry,” my chum called up on the ’phone, “did you see our ad in
to-night’s paper?”
“Yes,” I shot back at him, “and if you want to know the plain truth
of the matter I don’t think much of it, either. For it isn’t on the
square.”
“They pulled a boner in the newspaper office,” he then explained. “That
line about the diamonds was lifted out of another article and put into
our ad by mistake. The editor just told me so over the ’phone. I’m
wondering now what the result of the mistake will be.”
We weren’t long in finding out. In the next two days we received
sixty-three letters. Nor was it an easy matter for us to find out which
one of these sixty-three pickle makers was the pickle genius of whom we
were in search.