Poppy Ott's pedigreed pickles

When Poppy Ott jumps into a thing he usually knows where he’s going to land. For he’s a pretty smart boy for his age, as you probably will agree with me if you have read the ear...

“Our business career was kind of short and snappy,” I told Poppy, when we had turned a corner out of sight of the Canners Exchange Bank where our enemy, Forrest Pennykorn, had j...

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 tha...

“The mistake that our proof reader made in your ad,” the newspaper editor admitted to us the following morning, “was nothing short of downright carelessness. Still,” he laughed,...

I almost died. But when I got all ready to do it, sort of, with Dad flying around like a rooster with its head cut off and Mother rubbing my stomach with a hot cloth that looked...

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 pictur...

Our state geographies tell us that thousands of years ago the valley in which our town is located was the channel of a gigantic river that carried off the huge overflow of the G...

We weren’t so fed up on business stuff that we had forgotten how to be boys, with a liking for the kind of fun that is particularly boys’ fun. So, as it was still early in the a...

Did you ever notice how crazy some people are to get something for nothing? A free show always gets a big hand no matter how punk it is. And however much some women may hate cor...

Poppy and I were in a bad fix. There were no “if’s” or “and’s” about that. Not only was our pickle business shot sky high, but we were liable to end up in jail. In fact, it was...

During the next hour Bill Hadley did a lot of noisy stomping around. For that’s his way of working. He has the idea, I guess, that it makes him seem important.

To this day Poppy tells the crazy story that I screeched so loud that I rocked the furniture. And the wonder is, he further kids me, that the pipe organ didn’t streak it for the...

Mrs. O’Mally got all ready to go to the door, expecting to hear the visitor knock. But instead, after a searching glance at the house, which made us think that he was wishing in...

Putting the Pennykorn gang out of our minds for the time being, Poppy and I again took up the peculiar puzzle of the one-armed cat killer. He sure was a big hunk of mystery, all...

Now that it was dark, with the shadows banked up around the old stone house like prowling black monsters from the river, would the one-armed treasure hunter come back through th...

“But how did it escape the cat killer?” I cried. And then, as my mind took in a wider and more important sweep, I inquired of my chum how he had escaped the cat killer, too.

About fourteen feet in depth, the roomy chamber was furnished with a rustic table, over which hung a lantern, two chairs, and, on opposite sides, well back, two floor beds, the...

Landing on the north shore of the river, the boats were dragged out of the water, to keep them from wandering off into the current, after which we jiggled the cave truck into fo...

Two--three days passed. And were Poppy and I ever the busy little bees! Oh, boy! We were here, there and everywhere, with the president of the Ladies’ Aid pulling our coat tails...

Starting down the street, after having telephoned to Mr. Pennykorn from the Western Union office, as I have written down in the conclusion of the preceding chapter, I was overta...

“It’s funny, Jerry,” says he, “what queer ideas a fellow gets about big business men. I always pictured a railroad president as a towering, square-shouldered, high-pressure man...

“It’s your confounded pickles,” he went on. “They’re interfering with my domestic affairs. In the morning my wife is in such a hurry to get over to the church that she doesn’t h...