Poppy Ott's pedigreed pickles

Our state geographies tell us that thousands of years ago the valley in which our town is located was the channel of a gigantic river that carried off the huge overflow of the Great Lakes. As I understand it Niagara Falls wasn’t doing business in those dim and distant days. It would be interesting to know just why the overflow stream got tired of the old channel and started a new one. And, to that point, what a bully sight the old stream must have been. Certainly, if it were as deep as our sandstone bluffs are high it was some river.

To-day the farmers raise corn on what used to be the bed of the big river. It is from this rich “bottom land,” as we call it, that the Tutter Canning Company gets the most of its sweet-corn supply. And it was into this farming section, so familiar to us, that Poppy and I now turned our noses to see about buying cucumbers.

Going south on River Street as far as the river itself, a sluggish shrunken stream as compared to what it used to be, we turned to the right into a dirt road. The river on one side of us and the cornfields on the other side were mostly hidden by horse weeds three times our height. Pretty tall horse weeds, huh? Well, if you ever come to Tutter in the summer time I’ll show you some pretty tall corn, too.

After a walk of two miles or more on the dusty dirt road we came within sight of a two-story stone house. Not only was it a very old house, with walls two feet thick, as I very well knew, but it was queer-shaped, with a steep roof. High above everything else was a chimney that for size had it on any house chimney for miles around. It was six sizes too big for the work it had to do, but, of course, having been built when the house was put up it never had been changed.

It was to this lonely country place that Mrs. Cora O’Mally had moved when her Tutter house burned down, which fire I remember well, for that was the night I swallowed a button that had gotten into my bag of peppermint candy by mistake. As the insurance had run out on her house, the widow couldn’t rebuild. But when the Tutter people heard that she was planning to move into the old Weir house in the river bottoms, a place that had been deserted for years and, in consequence, was almost a wreck, money was quickly raised with which the house had been fixed up. I might say here that a certain young gink by the name of Jerry Todd had helped to smash the old doors and windows. For an old-time deserted house always attracts boys. And of this particular house a lot of queer stories were told. Holdups; bloody battles; even murder. In fact, a number of superstitious people, believing in ghosts, said at the time Mrs. O’Mally moved into the old house that she was foolish. It was no place to live, they declared.

To show you how a hard-working woman can fix up a place, the yard, as we saw it to-day, was grassy instead of weedy, with beds of blooming flowers sprinkled here and there. Vines performed on strings at the two porches. And another larger vine with sharp fingers had clawed its way up the stone wall to the roof.

Mrs. O’Mally was in her big cucumber patch back of the house. We could see her broad-brimmed straw hat. There were smaller bobbing hats, too, which told us that the pickle woman, as she was called in Tutter, had already put a number of young pickers to work.

“Unfortunate indeed is the aged body who has to raise cucumbers for a livin’,” she straightened and drained the sweat from her blistered face as we stopped beside her. “’Tis hard work,” she added, with a deep, weary sigh. “An’ the wonder to me is that me ould back doesn’t give out entirely.”

“You surely have enough of them,” laughed Poppy, looking over the big patch, now in its third year.

“Enough, did ye say? Sure,” came the tired smile, “I could fill all the pickle jars in New York City an’ Chicago put together. There’s hundreds of bushels. An’ with the job of pickin’ ’em, ’tis mighty glad I am,” she beamed at us in her kindly way, “to have the help of two more b’ys of your size.”

I told her that instead of having come to pick for her, as I had done the first summer she lived here, we had come to buy. As pickle manufacturers we might want thirty or forty bushels, I said, talking big. And having ordered four bushels as a starter, at two dollars a basket, we followed her to the house and wrote out a check.

“You haven’t told me,” says she curiously, sipping a glass of cold water, “who’s goin’ to do the picklin’ for ye.”

“Aunt Jemima,” laughed Poppy, who, I might say, having but recently come to Tutter, never had been in the stone house before.

Mrs. O’Mally’s face showed plainly enough that she didn’t know who “Aunt Jemima” was.

“Don’t you remember,” I put in with a grin. “Aunt Jemima is the colored lady who makes the swell pancakes. She’s going to work for us, too.”

That, of course, puzzled her all the more. But however curious she was we couldn’t very well tell her the truth.

Though it was blistering hot in the sun the house was cool, largely on account of its thick walls, I suppose. So, seated comfortably, we were in no particular hurry to leave. Besides, not having forgotten that Mrs. O’Mally usually kept a supply of swell cookies on hand, it might pay us, I figured, to sort of stick around.

Suddenly something tipped over in the cellar. At the sound the woman screamed, her hands clutching the front of her dress. And turning to us, as white as chalk, I saw, too, that she was trembling from head to foot. Scareder eyes I never expect to see.

“There’s some one down there,” I cried.

“The cat,” she says, getting quick control of herself. “Come,” she seemed anxious to get rid of us. “Let’s go outside.”

“What the dickens?...” says Poppy, looking back at the house from the dirt road. “Do you suppose she’s got a prisoner down there?—or that some one is hiding in the house?”

“Maybe it was the old river pirate,” I joked.

“Who?”

“Old Peg-leg Weir.” Then remembering that he wasn’t posted on the strange history of the old place, I explained: “He’s the man who built the house in the first place. Didn’t you notice how queer it is?”

“I saw that it has unusually thick walls.”

“Yes,” says I, “and the farther down the walls go the thicker they get.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well,” I countered, “if you were a river pirate, and liable to be surprised any minute by a posse, wouldn’t you like to have plenty of secret doors to jump through?”

“Do you mean to say that there are secret doors in the cellar walls?”

“That’s the story.”

There was a doubting laugh.

“You’ll be telling me next that there’s a ghost, too.”

“Sure thing,” says I cheerfully. “That was what we heard.”

“Cuckoo!”

I then told my chum the complete story of the old house as the tale had been handed down to me—how old Peg-leg Weir and his band had preyed on the early river packets, from one of which they had taken a big treasure in gold that was being brought up stream from St. Louis. Then had come the death of the pirate chief, at the hands of an angry posse, after which the band had been scattered.

The pirate’s treasure, I wound up, never had been lifted, but lay exactly where its rascally owner had hidden it. There were secret rooms under the queer house, I said, and hidden doors in the stone walls. It also was reported that there was a hidden tunnel through which the pirate and his band had carried their stolen gold from the river into the secret cellars.

“But tell me,” says Poppy, sort of pulling the story to pieces in his mind, “if this is all true, how does it come that the old house wasn’t long ago torn down? For that would have proved or disproved the story of the hidden rooms.”

“People were scared of the ghost.”

“Bunk!”

“On rainy nights,” says I, “is when it usually comes out. For it was on a rainy night that old Peg-leg Weir was drowned.”

“Drowned? I thought you just said he was shot by a posse.”

“That’s one story. The other one is that he was drowned in his bed. You see,” I ran off into my usual nonsense, “he slept in the attic. There was a knothole in the roof. And rather than have the rain beat on his face as he lay in bed he shoved his peg-leg into the hole. The rain swelled the wooden leg so that it stuck tight. And the leg being hollow, the water ran down inside of it, as though through a spout, and drowned him.”

“I’d as soon believe that story,” laughed Poppy, “as the other one. Ghosts! Pooh! What we heard in the house wasn’t a ghost. Nor was it a cat, either.”

“Maybe,” was my further nonsense, “Mrs. O’Mally has a new husband. And she’s modestly keeping him out of sight.”

“Shall we break the news to Mr. McGinty?” grinned Poppy.

“I guess,” says I in good sense, “we’d better keep our mouths shut. For whatever it was that we heard it’s none of our business.”

“What puzzles me,” says Poppy, “is the way the woman acted. The noise wasn’t a surprise to her. Yet, if she knew what caused it, why was she so scared?”

That was queer, I agreed.