“Very well,” the old man gravely accepted the honor. “You may call me your ‘silent’ partner, if you wish. Which means that you’re to run the business as you see fit and I’m to look on. As for sharing in the profits, I’ll take my pay in pickles.”
“So many pickles as that?” Poppy looked his surprise.
“Oh,” came dryly, “it may not be so terribly many. Probably not more than two or three quarts a month at the most.”
CHAPTER III
WHOSE PICKLES
“What’s luckier than the left-hand foot of a tongue-tied graveyard rabbit?” says I to Poppy, when our “silent” partner had gone into the house to eat his dinner.
I thought at first that old long-face wasn’t going to answer me, so busy was he building shelves and counters in his mind. But finally it percolated into his crowded cranium that I had asked him a question.
“What?” says he, deciding that shelf number six was a trifle too high and that the wrapping counter needed to be shoved a thirty-second of an inch to the left.
“A cat in a cistern,” says I.
“Cuckoo!” was his lack of appreciation of my cleverness.
“I’m not talking about ‘cuckoos,’” I threw back at him. “I’m talking about cats—k-a-t-z, cats. And the point is, that if Mr. Weckler’s tomcat hadn’t skidded into a convenient cistern, thus giving you a chance to do the hero stuff, our Pickle Parlor might have cut its baby teeth in a dry-goods box instead of a juvenile bungalow. Hence the good luck to us, as I say. Oh, you needn’t look so disgusted,” I began to spar at him, “or the first thing you know I’ll show you how easy a vice-president can take a mere president down and rub dirt on the end of his nose.”