“Gold and pickles, both.”
I suddenly sat up.
“Good night! With so much other truck going on I’d completely forgotten about that bin of cucumbers. What are we going to do with them?”
“We’ve either got to pickle them,” says Poppy, “or sell them to old Pennykorn at a loss of a dollar and ten cents a bushel.”
I put my adding machine to work.
“That’s almost eight hundred dollars.”
“If the treasure turns out as well as we hope,” says he, “the loss of eight hundred dollars might not cripple us. But just the same I’d go ten miles out of my way before I’d lose even a penny to that grasping old geezer.”
“But, Poppy,” says I, getting a slant on his thoughts, “how in the world are we going to pickle seven hundred bushels of cucumbers? For even if we had plenty of money to work with, we wouldn’t know how to go about it.”
“We might hire old Butch,” he grinned, flipping his necktie into shape.
“Yes,” says I, matching his nonsense with some of my own, “and we might commit suicide, too. But who wants to do that when fried cakes are only ten cents a yard?”