Poppy Ott's pedigreed pickles

In our search for the pickle genius we hadn’t dreamed for the tail end of a second that anyone short of a first-class cook had made the poochy pickles. And we had sort of pictured in our minds a spotless kitchen, puddled with sunshine, with a line-up of shiny aluminum kettles on the shelves, clever little ruffled doo-dads at the windows, a gurgling canary, and, to finish off, an old rag rug of many colors in the middle of the kitchen floor.

With all this junk in our minds, consider, then, the shock to us of learning that the pickle genius was no other than old Butch McGinty. The Tutter mule driver! Wow! As the saying is, we were completely flabbergasted.

For we realized, of course, that the one thing we couldn’t do would be to popularize old Butch’s pickles in Tutter. Without a doubt they were the most wonderful pickles that ever swam around in a canning jar. But, even so, who among the Tutter people would want to eat them? Certainly, no one who knew the mule driver, himself.

Our pickle ship having gone on the rocks, as it were, I hastened to comfort Poppy with the suggestion that our store could easily be changed over into a Popcorn Parlor. So we really weren’t out anything except some shoe leather and the cost of our newspaper ad.

But instead of falling on my neck in grateful appreciation he hoisted up the coat tails of my scheme and gave it a swift kick.

“I graduated from popcorn two years ago,” says he, thus reminding me that it was from selling popcorn that he had gotten his nickname.

But I dug in.

“Popcorn, peanuts and chewing gum,” I recited.

“Pickles,” says he, “and nothing else but.”

“Poppy,” I then lit into him, “you’re a bull-head.”

“Just so you don’t call me a crab,” he laughed.

You can’t very well scrap with a chum who sort of pokes fun at himself instead of handing it back, so I shut up. Dog-gone him! If he thought for one instant that he could sell old Butch’s pickles in Tutter let him go ahead and try it. He’d wish in the end that he had listened to me.

“Of course,” says he, sort of reading my thoughts, “I realize that pickles made in Mr. McGinty’s house won’t sell. But we can have them made some place else. All we’ve got to do is to borrow his pickle recipe. And then your mother, or any other woman, can do the trick.”

“Some one tap me on the dome with a pile driver,” says I. “I never thought of that.”

“Then it’s decided,” grinned old heavy-brain, “that we’re going to stick to pickles and forget about the peanuts and chewing gum?”

“Pickles it is, kid.”

But we struck a snag when we tried to separate old Butch from his choice recipe. Nothin’ doin’, he said. The recipe was a secret. And much less than give us a copy of it, he wouldn’t sell us a copy for a thousand dollars.

“How would it be,” Poppy then suggested, “if we used your recipe and paid you a royalty?”

Butch knew a lot of things, but it was mostly about mules.

“A which?” says he.

“A royalty.”

“What’s a royalty?”

“We use your recipe. See? And having made a lot of pickles we sell them. All right. Every time we take in ten dollars we put nine dollars into our money box and one dollar into your money box. The money is your royalty—or, in other words, your pay—for letting us use your recipe.”

“Kain’t do it,” he again turned us down.

“Why not? Isn’t ten per cent enough for you?”

“A promise is a promise.”

“Meaning which?” says Poppy.

“As I told you, the recipe is a secret. An’ when it was given to me I was made to promise that I’d never let it git out of my hands.”

I quickly got the leader’s ear.

“Find out who gave him the recipe,” I whispered.

But did we put anything over on old Butch? Not so you could notice it. Instead of dishing out to us the hoped-for answer, he started talking about the time his mule rolled in a box of mortar and lost all its hair.

There was a “do-or-die” look on Poppy’s face.

“We’ve got to have pickles,” says he.

“Wa-al?”

“And if you won’t let us have your recipe, or tell us where you got it, the only thing left for us to do is to hire you.”

“Meanin’ that you want me to work fur you?”

“Exactly.”

“Makin’ pickles?”

Poppy nodded.

“Um.... My business is towin’, not pickle makin’.”

“You may find,” says Poppy, “that you can make more money pickling than towing. For what you take in from towing isn’t all profit. The wear and tear on your outfit is considerable.”

“They hain’t no wear an’ tear on a mule.”

“Every time your mule shakes its tail,” says Poppy, seriously, “a certain amount of physical energy is used up. And to supply this energy you’ve got to buy corn and oats. The more tail shaking, naturally the more oats. That is what I call the expense of upkeep. Or, in other words, the expense of wear and tear.”

Old Butch was staring now. For this “wear and tear” business, as applied to his mule, was a new wrinkle to him.

“I swan!” he exploded. “What do you want me to do, tie a flatiron to my mule’s tail so he kain’t shake it?”

“The point is,” Poppy galloped along, “that you can turn Jerusalem out to pasture if you work for us, and nature’s grass will foot the wear and tear bill. Then all you make will be profit.”

“I swan!” came again.

“The most we can afford to pay you,” says Poppy, getting down to brass tacks, “is three-fifty a day. Nor would we want to pay you any less, for we’re going to keep you on the jump.”

As I have written down, Butch’s jobs, both towing and house moving, are kind of few and far between. So he hadn’t any thought of turning us down.

“Um... Three-fifty a day, you say.”

“Exactly.”

“Meanin’ three dollars an’ fifty cents?”

Poppy nodded.

“Three dollars and fifty cents,” says he, “and without any wear and tear.”

The gray eyes narrowed.

“Got plenty of money?”

“Plenty,” says Poppy.

“When do I start in?”

“To-morrow morning.”

“An’ you’re sure you’ve got plenty of money?”

Poppy laughed.

“If it’ll ease your mind any on that point we’ll write you out a three-dollar-and-fifty-cent check every night at quitting time.”

The old man let out his hairy neck.

“A check? Be you got a check book?”

“Of course,” says Poppy. “That’s a necessary part of running the business.”

“I swan! Boys runnin’ ’round with check books, when, gol ding it, I hain’t even got one myself.”

I jumped onto Poppy when we were outside.

“You sure are dumb.”

“What’s wrong now?” came the grin.

“To think that you should go and hire him.”

“I had to in order to get pickles.”

“But you said yourself that no one in Tutter would eat his pickles.”

“I said,” came the correction, “that pickles made in his home wouldn’t sell.”

“If it’s your scheme,” says I, “to have him make the pickles some place else, they’ll still be his pickles. And that will queer them. For everybody who knows him will take it for granted that the pickles aren’t clean.”

“But, Jerry, they will be clean. For we’ll watch him like a hawk.”

“It won’t work,” I shook my head.

The leader laughed. And right away I saw that he had something up his sleeve.

“Say, Jerry,” says he, “did you ever notice the picture of Aunt Jemima on the pancake flour?”

“Sure thing. But what’s Aunt Jemima got to do with our pickles?”

“We all know that Aunt Jemima is just a made-up character. The same as the Cream of Wheat man. As I understand it, such characters are used in advertising and selling to give the product a sort of personal touch. Just to look at the big grin on Aunt Jemima’s face convinces us that her pancakes are good. So we are led to think of good pancakes instead of flour. Which is all to the point that if we put this ‘Aunt Jemima’ scheme to work in our own business our customers will be led to think of good pickles, and the question of who made them may never come up.”

That kid! If he isn’t the limit. The schemes in his head are thicker than mice in a corncrib. If something bobs up to cripple one scheme he drags out another. And if that one gets paralysis, or the chilblains, he has still a third. To tell the truth, this ‘Aunt Jemima’ stuff was all Greek to me. But what of that? If he had the nerve to tackle it, and take the responsibility, certainly I ought to be willing to stand back of him and help him.

The decision having thus been arrived at that Aunt Jemima was going to do some pickling as well as pancaking, we shook hands on it, for good luck, and then set out to buy a train-load of cucumbers.