“Don’t sell the white one,” grinned Scoop, “for we need it in our act. Remember?—I wave the magic wand over the empty teacup and out jumps a white rabbit.”
“Tommy Hegan wants to buy a pair of rabbits,” I told Peg, who promised to call on the Grove Street kid the first thing in the morning.
Scoop was adding in his mind.
“If you can get three dollars,” he told Peg, “we’ll have an even thirty. That ought to be enough to start with.”
“Thirty dollars,” repeated Red, thinking of his stomach. “That will buy—um—three hundred [[9]]ten-cent dishes of ice-cream; or six hundred ice-cream cones; or three thousand penny sticks of licorice; or——”
Scoop gave the hungry one a contemptuous up-and-down look.
“Good-night!” he groaned, throwing up his hands. “It’s a hopeless case.”
Red grinned. For he likes to get Scoop’s goat.
“I can’t work,” he strutted around, holding his freckled nose in the air, “if I can’t eat. And if you expect me to put in ten dollars——”
“Your ten dollars is an investment,” explained Scoop, who has learned a lot about business from his father. “It gives you a quarter interest in the company.” He paused, then added with a grin: “If we take in a million dollars, you get a quarter of it.”