Poppy Ott's pedigreed pickles

I almost died. But when I got all ready to do it, sort of, with Dad flying around like a rooster with its head cut off and Mother rubbing my stomach with a hot cloth that looked to me like an old woolen petticoat, Doc Leland bustled into the house with his pill case, out of which he mixed up some dope that did the miracle, as the saying is. And how wonderful it was to know, in the relief that Doc’s pills and a hot-water bottle brought to me, that I was going to have the chance, after all, of helping Poppy run the Pickle Parlor.

“Let this be a lesson to you,” lectured Doc, oggling me through his big nose glasses, “an’ don’t make a pig of yourself the next time you happen to sneak up on an unchaperoned pickle dish.”

“Pickles!” I gagged ... and you should have seen Dad jump for the basin! “I never want to eat another pickle as long as I live.”

Poppy, the big monkey, came in the next morning with a hunk of cauliflower tied up in fancy ribbons like a sick-room bouquet.

“When you get through with it,” he grinned, “your ma can pickle it.”

“Stop!” I shuddered. “Talk of anything else but pickles.”

“Say, Jerry,” he earnestly leaned over the bed, “I’ve got some news for you. We had a burglar in our house last night.”

“What?” I cried, staring at him.

“I thought during the night that I heard a noise in the cellar. But laying it to the cat, I didn’t get up, though now I wish I had.”

“But what would a burglar be doing in your cellar?” I further stared at him.

“That’s the queer part. Nothing was taken. But every jar of pickles that we owned was opened and the pickles dumped into a pile in the middle of the floor.”

Again I raised the “Stop!” signal on him.

“Make it ketchup,” I grimaced.

“Come to think of it,” he laughed, “it was ketchup. But I’d like to have you tell me,” he went on, serious again, “why a burglar should break into our cellar and destroy our canned pick—I mean our ketchup.”

As I have written down in other books, mentioned in the preface of this book, I have had a good bit of experience solving unusual mysteries. At one time I really called myself a Juvenile Jupiter Detective. That was in my “Whispering Mummy” book. So I’m right at home on the “mystery” dope.

“The burglar was looking for something,” says I, showing my stuff. “And if you’re half as smart as I think you are you ought to guess what that something is.”

“Diamonds?” says he.

“Nothing else but.”

“I thought of that. But it was such a crazy theory that I quickly dropped it. In the first place there are no diamonds. And if there had been, certainly, after finding them, I wouldn’t have been dumb enough to put them back in the pickle jar.”

“Maybe,” says I, so interested now that I didn’t care a rap whether he said “pickles” or not, “the burglar thinks you have diamonds in all of your jars.”

“Then he must be cuckoo.”

“Do you suppose,” was the view I then took, trying to find a deeper object for the queer act, “that there’s mystery going on that we don’t know about?”

“What do you mean?”

“There was a diamond robbery in Peoria. Bill Hadley said so. And maybe one of the thieves told his accomplice that he’d hide the booty in Tutter in somebody’s cellar. The fellow you heard could have been the accomplice trying to find his share of the hidden diamonds.”

I didn’t mean it, of course. It was pure nonsense. But you should have seen Poppy’s face!

“I think,” says he, “that you’d better have Doc Leland come back and doctor your head as well as your stomach.”

“Just the same,” I laughed, “it was the diamonds that brought the burglar to your home. It couldn’t have been anything else. Reading our ad, he found out somehow that you were back of it, and naturally his idea was that you had the diamonds in the house. So he tried to find them. It was queer, of course, that he searched for them only in the cellar. But that’s nothing. The main point is, will he come back again, hoping for better luck, or won’t he?”

“Everybody in town ought to know by this time that there are no real diamonds.”

“Evidently your burglar didn’t know the truth last night.... Did you tell Bill Hadley?”

“Not yet.”

“Bill is pretty smart at keeping an eye on strangers. And he’ll know if there’s any suspicious characters hanging around town.”

I was then told by my chum that he had gotten nine more letters at the newspaper office. We went through these together. And later Poppy did the usual calling and pickle-sampling act. But to no success.

I hardly knew what to think. It didn’t seem possible to me that any woman in Tutter could have missed seeing our ad. Then, too, there had been a lot of talk among the women about the “lucky pickle jar,” which all helped to make the news general. Yet, in all of our calls we hadn’t found the slightest trace of the particular pickles of which we were in need.

Could it be, as I had told Poppy that the one jar of pickles that had cranked up his imagination to such rosy Pickle Parlor dreams had been an accident, like the original Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde drug? And had we unknowingly talked with the woman who had made the pickles? If such was the case, certainly we ought to step on the gas and find her. For having once done the job right, even though by accident, she probably could learn to repeat. A little experimenting would do the trick.

I didn’t see any more of Poppy until evening. He had put in the afternoon slinging paint, he told me. Having finished the store-painting job, both inside and out, everything was now as slick as a button, and all we had to do was to wait for the paint to dry, which wouldn’t take more than two or three days.

“I even painted the sign,” he laughed. “Gee, you ought to see it. It looks like a million dollars.”

“But, Poppy,” says I, sort of perplexed, “what are we going to do with the store if we fall down on finding this star pickle maker? Had you thought of that?”

“Before I give up,” says he, “I’ll borrow every pickle recipe within ten miles and try them out myself.”

Which was a perfectly sound scheme, of course ... granting that we had oceans of time. But here we were within a week or ten days of heavy cucumber harvest.

No, we never could hope to get the necessary pickle supply started, for early business, by going about it in that way. And in twisting the matter around in my mind I began to wonder if we couldn’t sort of save our proposed business by changing it into a Popcorn Parlor. We could sell peanuts, too; even put in a stock of chewing gum and candy. Of course, a store like that hadn’t the originality, as you call it, of a Pickle Parlor, and hence wasn’t as exciting to think about. But it would be a store—our store, in fact. And as long as the business was ours what difference did it make to us what we sold? Certainly, was my further thought, it would be no trick to change the sign from “Poppy’s Pickle Parlor” to “Poppy’s Popcorn Parlor.”

Doc Leland had dished out the order that I was to stay in bed. But I got up and dressed the following morning, feeling quite like myself again except that the thought of pickles still gagged me. The letters now had stopped coming in. So we hadn’t any of the follow-up work to do. Nor was there anything we could do at Mr. Weckler’s house except to walk around our green and yellow store and admire it. Boy, we sure were the proud little peacocks. Our store! Of course, we didn’t own it; and, to that point, Mr. Weckler hadn’t told us just how long we could use it. But he was our “silent” partner. And having a warm interest in us, as we could see, our opinion was that he would let us use the store as long as we needed it.

That morning we took a trip into Zulutown, which is the name that the Tutter people have for the tough end of town beyond Dad’s brickyard, to talk with Mr. Butch McGinty about moving our store. I suppose Mr. McGinty has some other front name besides “Butch.” But that’s the only name I ever heard him called by. And it sure fits him to a “T”—big ox that he is, so hairy and red-nosed. An old bachelor, his home in Zulutown is the dirtiest place I ever set eyes on. He does his own cooking and housekeeping. It isn’t anything surprising to go into his house and find the cat sleeping in the middle of the dinner table. I’d hate to live that way.

Mr. McGinty’s business is “towing,” for which purpose he keeps a mule. He also moves small houses and hauls ashes. If you live near a canal you know what I mean by “towing.” It is much the same as house moving, only the thing that is “towed” isn’t a house, but a barge or flatboat. With all of his “towing” and house-moving work old Butch hasn’t much to do, for in a small town like Tutter the houses usually are left where they’re built. But when a job of this kind bobs up he usually gets it.

We found him in the kitchen baking cookies.

“Howdy, boys,” he welcomed us, acting so friendly about it that I could almost imagine that he knew we had a job for him. “Jest dump that stuff off them chairs,” he pointed, “an’ make yourselves homely.” Then he gave a leap for the oven, which was smoking out of its cracks like a volcano with a dozen craters. In his hurry to throw open the oven door he forgot to grab a cloth holder ... and thus burning his fingers maybe you think he didn’t explode! “Drat the luck! That’s the second batch of cookies that I’ve burnt to a crisp. Jest look at ’em!” and he dumped the junk into the middle of the kitchen floor.

You can’t be around Mr. McGinty without grinning. For he’s funny. And we grinned all the harder when he scratched his head with the cookie cutter.

“This thing of bein’ a bachelor,” he complained, disgusted with his poor work, “hain’t what it’s cracked up to be. Fur it never was intended nohow that a man should be his own cook. Me?—outside of makin’ pickles an’ pancakes I kain’t cook fur two cents. As fur sweepin’ an’ dustin’, they’s a way of doin’ it proper, I s’pose, but I’ve never yet found it.”

“Why don’t you get married?” laughed Poppy.

That brought a snort.

“An ol’ fool like me?” he ran himself down, though with twinkling eyes. “They hain’t nobody as would have me.”

I wanted to ask him how about the Widow O’Mally who lives in the old Weir house in the river bottoms. For everybody in Tutter knows that he shines around her every chance he gets. Dirty as he is in his own home, he’s some foxy old sheik, let me tell you, when he gets dolled up in his sparking clothes. But, of course, he wasn’t going to admit any of that stuff to a couple of boys.

He had better luck with the next batch of cookies.

“Jest help yourselves, boys,” was the liberal invitation, as he scooped the cookies out of the black pan with a pancake turner that was used other times for swatting flies. “I know how boys is,” he added, wiping off a cookie that had rolled across the floor. “You kain’t git ’em filled up. I was that way, too, when I was your age. So don’t be bashful. Jest pitch in an’ help yourselves. When I’ve got company I like to see ’em eat.”

We did the mannerly thing, of course, each of us taking a cookie and thanking him for it. Nibbling at mine, sort of gingerly, I found it wasn’t half bad.

Well, we came to terms about the house moving. It would cost us ten bucks, Butch said. Poppy tried to bring him down to nine dollars, figuring, I guess, that every dollar saved was a dollar earned, but, no, the house mover held out, ten dollars was his price, and we could take it or leave it.

Here I ran to the barn to say hello to Jerusalem, the “tow” mule, for we’re old friends. I wasn’t there very long. And when I joined Poppy in the street I noticed that he was acting sort of peculiar-like.

“Say, Jerry,” says he, “are you prepared for a big surprise?”

“What’s wrong now?” says I.

He fished something out of his pocket.

“Oof!” I turned up my nose. “Another pickle.”

“Mr. McGinty treated me to pickles while you were outside. And as they didn’t look so worse I bit into one. Before that, as you may remember, he had said something about making pickles. But it never had percolated into my bean that—”

I saw what was coming.

“My gosh!” I squeaked, staring at him in sudden dizziness. “Is he the pickle genius that we’ve been searching for?”

“There can be no doubt of it. I ate seven of his pickles. Wonderful! He had given six quarts to the church people, he told me, as they always hired him to haul their ashes.” From the look on the other’s face I could imagine that he had in his mind a picture of a kitchen cluttered with cobwebs, with dirty walls and a dirtier stove. “I’m beginning to wonder,” says he, looking dazed, “where we’re going to come out.”