“Some one tap me on the dome with a pile driver,” says I. “I never thought of that.”
“Then it’s decided,” grinned old heavy-brain, “that we’re going to stick to pickles and forget about the peanuts and chewing gum?”
“Pickles it is, kid.”
But we struck a snag when we tried to separate old Butch from his choice recipe. Nothin’ doin’, he said. The recipe was a secret. And much less than give us a copy of it, he wouldn’t sell us a copy for a thousand dollars.
“How would it be,” Poppy then suggested, “if we used your recipe and paid you a royalty?”
Butch knew a lot of things, but it was mostly about mules.
“A which?” says he.
“A royalty.”
“What’s a royalty?”
“We use your recipe. See? And having made a lot of pickles we sell them. All right. Every time we take in ten dollars we put nine dollars into our money box and one dollar into your money box. The money is your royalty—or, in other words, your pay—for letting us use your recipe.”