THE GOLD CUCUMBER
Poppy and I were in a bad fix. There were no “if’s” or “and’s” about
that. Not only was our pickle business shot sky high, but we were
liable to end up in jail. In fact, it was something of a wonder to us
that we weren’t already in jail.
Plainly enough something had gone wrong with the pickle making. While
we were running around with a microscope looking for specks of dirt,
old Butch had gotten hold of the fly poison or furniture polish by
mistake. From the way the pickles tasted I could imagine, too, that he
had dumped in an old rubber boot. Anyway, something had gotten into the
pickles that didn’t belong there. And it was this something, whatever
it was, that had poisoned them.
But the mere fact that the pickle maker, himself, had pulled the boner
didn’t let us out. Not at all. For he was just a hired part of our
business. As its owners, we would be held responsible.
Oh, how dumb we had been to let him go ahead--sloppy old coot that he
was--without checking up on every little thing that he had done! We
realized that now. But a fellow it seems always realizes those things
when it’s too late, like the time I sent the homely valentine to the
teacher. Ouch!
Old Butch, we learned, on sending a message into Zulutown, had gone up
the canal on a towing job. So we had no chance of finding out from him
how the poison had gotten into the pickles, or what it was. To that
point, though, the chances were ten to one he couldn’t have told us,
anyway. For it wasn’t to be believed for a single moment that he had
known that there was poison in the pickles. He was sloppy and dirty.
But he wasn’t a fool.
The same kid who brought us word of the closed Zulutown house carried a
note to Mother in which I explained that Poppy and I wouldn’t be home
for supper. Eat? Say, we hadn’t any more appetite than a seasick totem
pole.
It came dark. And finally we locked up the store and went down the
street. Nor did we try to hide when we saw the marshal coming. For we
realized that our medicine was waiting for us. So we might just as well
take it first as last.
“Howdy,” says Bill Hadley, as friendly as you please. “Sellin’ lots of
pickles?”
“No,” says Poppy, with a face as long as the day before Christmas, “we
haven’t sold any.”
“Which hain’t to be wondered at,” says Bill. “Fur them four samples
that you left with my wife was the rottenest pickles that ever sneaked
into a glass bottle. What’d you flavor ’em with?--fumigated sauerkraut?”
“Jerry thinks it was an old rubber boot,” Poppy grinned weakly.
“Um.... No rubber boot ever taste that bad.”
“You’re lucky,” says I, wishing he’d light into us and thus end the
suspense, “that you didn’t eat them. For if you had you’d be in bed
to-night along with the rest of the people.”
That seemed to surprise him.
“What do you mean?” says he, looking at me curiously.
“Haven’t you heard,” says I, surprised in turn, “about the people being
poisoned?”
“Sure thing.”
“Well,” says I, “the pickles did it. So if you had eaten them _you_
would have been poisoned, too.”
He scratched his head.
“What pickles are you talkin’ about?” says he.
“Why, our pickles, of course.”
“But it wasn’t your pickles that poisoned the people. It was them
stuffed olives that they had at the church supper last night. I hear,
too, that they hain’t expectin’ old Miz Higgins to pull through. Too
bad! Too bad! That’ll give church suppers a black eye fur the next ten
years.”
Poppy and I blew in a dollar and seventy cents that night celebrating.
Oh, boy, did we ever have a grand and glorious feeling! First we
stocked up with candy and popcorn. Then we went to the movie show.
After the show we had three dishes of ice cream apiece and two malted
milks. That is, I had two. Poppy, though, kind of petered out on his
second one.
But when we got home we sort of parked our hilarity under the bed. For
it wasn’t to be forgotten, the leader said, serious again, that our
pickle business was none the less of a fizzle. And to find out just how
heavy our loss was he got out his expense book. Here is a list of the
money that we had spent:
Lumber $ 3.00
Paint 2.00
Newspaper ad .50
Cucumbers 8.00
Pickle stuff 11.45
Tubs (2) 1.70
Barrel .40
Bottles 3.00
Bottle labels .75
Handbills 2.50
Store stuff 2.00
Butch’s wages 21.00
Moving store 10.00
Celebration 1.70
--------
Total paid out $ 68.00
Money in bank $100.00
Money paid out 68.00
--------
Money left $ 32.00
“It might have been worse,” says I, trying not to feel downhearted over
the loss of our money. “We’ve got thirty-two dollars left and the two
tubs.”
“But you don’t know the worst,” says Poppy, sitting on the edge of the
bed with his chin in his hands.
“What do you mean?” says I, suddenly struck by the fact that he was
acting unusually downcast.
“Prepare yourself for some bad news, kid.”
“Have we lost the thirty-two dollars, too?” I squeaked.
“Worse than that.”
He wasn’t joking. I saw that plainly enough. In fact, he seemed to
be downright worried. I never had seen him that way before. So I got
worried, too. But to all of my eager questions he shook his head. He’d
tell me the tale of woe in the morning, he said.
During the night the hall light outside of our bedroom was switched
on, and sitting up in bed, blinking, I saw Doc Leland waddle past the
door, jiggling something in a glass. He had been called to the house,
I learned, to see Mother, who, having gotten a pain in her stomach in
the middle of the night, had hysterically jumped to the conclusion that
she, too, had been poisoned. But all she had was a touch of indigestion.
Hearing me talking with Dad in the hall, Doc waddled out of the sick
room to inquire how my stomach pains were. I was all right, I said.
Ding-a-ling-a-ling-a-ling went the ’phone in the lower hall.
“It’s for you, Doc,” Dad presently called up the stairs.
“Yes,” Doc wheezed into the machine when he got to it. “This is Leland.
What’s that? Who? Oh!... Old Mr. Weckler. Yes, I’ll be right over. Now,
don’t let yourself get flustered, Miz Clayton. Jest keep cool an’ do
the best you can for him till I get there. You won’t have to wait many
seconds.”
“Is Mr. Weckler sick, too?” Dad inquired.
“Miz Clayton says some one tried to murder him.”
“What?” cried Dad.
“It’s her story that she found him lyin’ in the library in a pool of
blood. Robbery, I s’pose. Well, let’s hope I get there in time to save
him.” There was some hurried talk about Mother’s medicine. She would be
all right by morning, Doc said. Then the front door slammed.
I got my chum out of bed in a jiffy.
“Did you hear that?” says I excitedly.
“What?” says he, looking at me sleepily.
“A robber broke into old Mr. Weckler’s house to-night and tried to
murder him.”
Poppy bounced three feet.
“Quick!” says I. “Jump into your clothes.”
Lucky for us we were of a size. For in the scramble to get dressed I
got his pants and he got my shoes. Nor were we completely buttoned up
until we were halfway down the block.
Except for the sounds that we stirred up ourselves as we skinned along
on the toes of our rubber-soled shoes, the empty streets were as silent
as their own deep shadows. And while it was mid-summer, with the days
soaked full of heat, there was now a damp feeling in the air that sort
of cranked up our shivering apparatus. Maybe, though, it wasn’t so much
the night air that gave us the shivers as it was the excitement.
Murder! That’s the worst kind of a crime that can be committed. And
if it were true, as Mrs. Clayton had told Doc over the ’phone, that
an attempt had been made to kill old Mr. Weckler in his own home,
then there was in Tutter a criminal of the worst sort. Naturally,
Bill Hadley would be on the job. For, as town marshal, this was work
in his line. There would be a quick search for clews; then, no doubt,
an exciting arrest. As we had helped Bill before, and to very good
results, too, as you should well know if you have read my books about
the “Whispering Mummy” and the “Purring Egg,” we were quite sure that
he would let us help him on this job. As a matter of fact, we felt
that it was our duty to help him. For wasn’t Mr. Weckler our “silent”
partner? Furthermore, if the same robber, in earlier work, had been in
Poppy’s house, as we both thought, certainly Bill ought to know about
it.
Our pickle store got scarcely a glance from us as we went by on the
run. And a moment or two later we tumbled into the yard in front of the
old-fashioned house of which we had seen so much lately, but over which
now a cloud of mystery hung. There were bright lights in the downstairs
windows. And the front door was open.
Under the circumstances we didn’t stop to knock. Nor did Doc or Mrs.
Clayton seem at all surprised when we tumbled in on them. As a matter
of fact, I think they were glad to see us. For, with the housekeeper
shivering and shaking, we supplied the help Doc needed to get the
unconscious man onto the library couch. Blood! His head was bloody and
there was blood all over the floor. I even got my hands in it. Ough! It
sort of sickened me.
“Some hot water,” says Doc crisply, “an’ make it snappy.”
Poppy and I got the water for him. For we could move faster than the
housekeeper. To tell the truth, she wasn’t any help to him at all. And
for fear that he might have her on his hands, along with the injured
house owner, he ordered her to back up into a chair and stay there.
Later the still unconscious man was carried upstairs and put into his
bed, after which Doc telephoned for a trained nurse. Mr. Weckler was
in mighty bad shape, we learned. Even if he lived it probably would be
necessary to operate on his skull to give him back the use of his mind.
“When he comes to,” Doc told the nurse, who got there just as the clock
struck three, “he’ll prob’ly be as crazy as a loon. So be right here
beside the bed. For if given a minute he may do hisself serious harm.”
“I’ll be here,” says the nurse grimly.
In ordering the housekeeper back to bed, Doc mixed up some kind of dope
to settle her nerves. And then, when everything was quiet in the house,
he waddled into the library and thumbed through the ’phone book for a
number.
“It’s time now,” says he, “to call in the law.”
An open window showed how the unknown robber had gotten into and out
of the house. Going outside we found heel prints under the window.
Here, too, our flashlight picked up the carcass of Mr. Weckler’s
yellow cat. Stone dead, Poppy said. Running ahead, he followed the
escaping robber’s tracks in the soft grassy earth. Coming to a flower
bed, around which I now vaguely remembered that a heavy wire had been
strung, I saw him drop to his knees. For the robber, it seems, striking
the knee-high wire in his flight from the house, had gone kerplunk! on
his snout into the flower bed. The imprint of his right hand showed
plainly, but, strange to say, there was no left-hand imprint.
The silence of the sleeping street was broken by the rattle of a
flivver. Then a shaft of light cut across the yard in a sweeping
circle. Bill Hadley having arrived, I started forward to meet him with
the story of our discoveries. But a cry from Poppy stopped me.
“Jerry! Look! Here’s money that flew out of the robber’s pocket. Fifty
cents and three quarters. Here’s a knife, too. And here’s something
else.” There was a short silence. “Well, I’ll be cow-kicked! What do
you know if it isn’t a cucumber! A _gold cucumber_!”
I was back in two jumps. A gold cucumber! What in time did he mean by
that? I soon found out. For he had the object in his hand. A sort of
pocket piece, about an inch long and as heavy as lead, it had been cast
in the perfect pattern of a cucumber.
We knew now that the robber was one-armed; that for some strange
reason he hated yellow cats; and that he had a particular interest in
cucumbers.