“Aren’t you the boy,” the man’s eyes then showed their admiration, “who brought the stilt idea to town?”
“We’re the boys,” corrected Poppy, which shows what kind of a pal he is. Yes, sir, as I’ve said before, when the angels were putting old Poppy together they dumped in an extra gob of fairness. And then to sort of balance things they put in another extra gob of squareness, with the result that he’s the fairest and squarest pal I ever had or ever hope to have if I live a million years.
“Wire collect complete detailed description of diamonds,” our telegram read. And when we saw that it was signed by the Peoria chief of police you could have sliced off our eyes with a baseball bat.
“Wow!” says Poppy. “This is getting kind of complicated.”
I have no better grown-up friend in all Tutter than Bill Hadley, the town marshal. So we went to him to find out what we should do about the telegram. Billy had a good laugh when he heard of our predicament. We weren’t to worry about the telegram, he said. He’d take care of that matter for us.
“Evidently,” was his opinion, “there’s been a diamond robbery down in Peoria, an’ that’s why the chief wants a description of your diamonds.”
“What if we get more such telegrams from Chicago and other cities?” says Poppy.
“Just bring ’em to me.”
We put in the whole morning and the biggest part of the afternoon following up the letters that were mailed to us through the newspaper office. The second batch of letters brought us no more success than the first six. At noon we were handed more. Twenty-six this trip. Can you imagine! We called on short women, tall women, young women, old women, pretty women, cross-looking women, skinny women, fat women, women who had lost their husbands, and a few who still were wishing. For by three o’clock a total of fifty-four letters had been received at the newspaper office. We sampled so many pickles that they began to stick out of our eyes. Toward the last the sight of a pickle made me gag. And this, by the way, got us into trouble. For one woman caught me turning up my nose at her pickles and landed on me with a broom.
“I’ll teach you to ask me for pickles and then turn up your nose at them behind my back,” she screeched. “Take that, you young whippersnapper. And that and that.”