Our pickle ship having gone on the rocks, as it were, I hastened to comfort Poppy with the suggestion that our store could easily be changed over into a Popcorn Parlor. So we really weren’t out anything except some shoe leather and the cost of our newspaper ad.
But instead of falling on my neck in grateful appreciation he hoisted up the coat tails of my scheme and gave it a swift kick.
“I graduated from popcorn two years ago,” says he, thus reminding me that it was from selling popcorn that he had gotten his nickname.
But I dug in.
“Popcorn, peanuts and chewing gum,” I recited.
“Pickles,” says he, “and nothing else but.”
“Poppy,” I then lit into him, “you’re a bull-head.”
“Just so you don’t call me a crab,” he laughed.
You can’t very well scrap with a chum who sort of pokes fun at himself instead of handing it back, so I shut up. Dog-gone him! If he thought for one instant that he could sell old Butch’s pickles in Tutter let him go ahead and try it. He’d wish in the end that he had listened to me.
“Of course,” says he, sort of reading my thoughts, “I realize that pickles made in Mr. McGinty’s house won’t sell. But we can have them made some place else. All we’ve got to do is to borrow his pickle recipe. And then your mother, or any other woman, can do the trick.”