“But what’s the use,” says I, “of letting on that we have a Pickle Parlor when we haven’t?”
“A business is a business,” says he, “from the time it’s organized. And we’ve been organized for more than an hour.”
“But we haven’t any store. And you say yourself that you don’t know where we’re going to get our pickles.”
“I know where we’re going to get the first quart,” he grinned.
I saw then that he was holding something back. Which was like him, of course! And so I was prepared for something of a surprise as I followed him down the street to his home, where he reappeared from the cellar with a jar of cucumber pickles, which, on sampling, I had to acknowledge were the swellest home-made cucumber pickles that I ever had set my teeth into.
“Who made ’em?” I smacked.
“That,” says he, “is something I have yet to find out.”
“Don’t you know?” I stared.
He slowly shook his head.
“It may seem to you, Jerry, that I just jumped into this Pickle Parlor scheme on a moment’s notice. But it’s a fact I’ve been twisting the scheme around in my head for the past two days. And what put it into my head in the first place was this jar of pickles. Pickles like these, I told myself, would make a storekeeper rich in no time, providing he had enough of them to sell. And what fun it would be, I thought, to run a store of that kind. A Pickle Parlor! The name popped into my head just like that,” and he snapped his fingers in illustration. “But I ran up against a snag when I tried to find out who had made the pickles. I have them here, as you can see. But I don’t know where they came from.”