He fished something out of his pocket.
“Oof!” I turned up my nose. “Another pickle.”
“Mr. McGinty treated me to pickles while you were outside. And as they didn’t look so worse I bit into one. Before that, as you may remember, he had said something about making pickles. But it never had percolated into my bean that—”
I saw what was coming.
“My gosh!” I squeaked, staring at him in sudden dizziness. “Is he the pickle genius that we’ve been searching for?”
“There can be no doubt of it. I ate seven of his pickles. Wonderful! He had given six quarts to the church people, he told me, as they always hired him to haul their ashes.” From the look on the other’s face I could imagine that he had in his mind a picture of a kitchen cluttered with cobwebs, with dirty walls and a dirtier stove. “I’m beginning to wonder,” says he, looking dazed, “where we’re going to come out.”
CHAPTER VI
POPPY’S “AUNT JEMIMA” SCHEME
In our search for the pickle genius we hadn’t dreamed for the tail end of a second that anyone short of a first-class cook had made the poochy pickles. And we had sort of pictured in our minds a spotless kitchen, puddled with sunshine, with a line-up of shiny aluminum kettles on the shelves, clever little ruffled doo-dads at the windows, a gurgling canary, and, to finish off, an old rag rug of many colors in the middle of the kitchen floor.
With all this junk in our minds, consider, then, the shock to us of learning that the pickle genius was no other than old Butch McGinty. The Tutter mule driver! Wow! As the saying is, we were completely flabbergasted.
For we realized, of course, that the one thing we couldn’t do would be to popularize old Butch’s pickles in Tutter. Without a doubt they were the most wonderful pickles that ever swam around in a canning jar. But, even so, who among the Tutter people would want to eat them? Certainly, no one who knew the mule driver, himself.