Читать книгу Poppy Ott and the Freckled Goldfish - Edward Edson Lee - Страница 3

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“What ever was your object in buying the goldfish in the first place?” I asked Poppy Ott.

“Speculation,” says he shortly.

“Then you must have struck a big bargain,” says I.

“No,” he shook his head.

It seemed to me that he was acting kind of mysterious. And this, coming on top of his peculiar goldfish purchase, puzzled me.

“How much did you pay?” I finally pinned him down.

“Two hundred dollars.”

I stared at him.

“Two hundred dollars?” I yipped. “Are you crazy?”

“There was a reason,” says he, to further mystery, “Why I couldn’t pay less.”

“Say, Poppy,” says I, giving him a steady eye, “you weren’t hypnotized, were you?”

“When?”

“The day they hung you up for the two hundred bucks.”

“There wasn’t any ‘they,’ to it, Jerry,” says he quietly. “It was a ‘she.’”

“Oh! . . .” I took another long look at him. “Chivalry stuff, huh?”

“Something like that,” he admitted.

I could see now why he had been acting so mysterious. He had a shine on some girl. And it was through her, in some way or another, that he had been touched for the two hundred bucks. The thought of him letting a girl turn his head that way sickened me. Considering his fine record I had expected him to show better sense. Now, with a girl on the string, our fun, probably, would be a thing of the past. Instead of solving mysteries, the young lover would want to put in his time scribbling sonnets and doing the usual moonlight ukulele stuff under the fair maiden’s bay window.

“Poppy,” says I, getting sicker every minute over his shameful downfall, “is it a serious case?”

“Would I have paid her two hundred dollars for a tubful of goldfish,” he countered earnestly, “if it wasn’t?”

Curiosity got the better of my other feelings.

“But where did she get the goldfish in the first place?” I puzzled.

“Raised them, I guess.”

“Evidently,” says I, “she must have a mamma goldfish and a papa goldfish.”

“Yes,” says he, “evidently she has.”

“And you actually dished out the two hundred dollars to her?”

“In cash,” he nodded.

“Poppy,” says I, sort of jealous-like, “does she run her fingers through your hair, and things like that?”

“Yesterday,” says he, “when I handed her the two hundred dollars, she told me that she loved me dearly. She kissed me, too. Right there,” he brazenly pushed out his cheek at me.

I could feel him slipping away from me. For the kissing stage is critical.

“I suppose she’ll spend the money on her trousseau,” I choked down my loneliness.

“Her which?” says he, letting out his neck.

“Her wedding dress,” I put it in plainer words.

“No,” shook his head. “She expects to spend it on her roof.”

“Her roof?” I stared. “What do you mean?—the top of her head?”

“No,” he grinned, “the roof of her house.”

This was funny talk, I thought. Roofs, as a rule, don’t interest lovers half as much as porch swings and over-stuffed davenports.

“Do I know her?” says I.

“I think so.”

“Is she as young as you are?”

“No,” he grinned again, “she is seventy-six.”

It came so unexpectedly that I almost keeled over. And what a relief! Oh, boy! It was like getting Poppy back from the grave.

He told me then that the old lady had kissed him in gratitude. For it was to help her with a two-hundred-dollar roofing bill that he had bought the goldfish. Then he brought out a notebook.

“Say, Jerry,” says he, “does your ma have any goldfish in the house?”

“No.”

“All right,” says he, quickly writing down the name, “that makes prospect number one. How about your pa?”

“Business men don’t have goldfish in their offices,” says I.

“A good many of the Tutter business men are going to have goldfish in their offices,” says he, with a determined waggle, “before we get through with them.”

“I’ve got a photograph of you,” says I, “selling my pa a goldfish.”

“Not a goldfish, Jerry. Make it plural.”

“Meaning a mamma goldfish and a papa goldfish, huh?”

“Exactly. We’ll sell them in pairs. Sort of joined together in the finny bonds of matrimony, as it were.”

“I suppose, as the leader, you know which is the papa,” I grinned.

“That’s easy. You poke your finger in the water. Like this—see? If he bites it, it’s a he; and if she bites it, it’s a she.”

“You’re cuckoo,” I told him. But, just the same, he could see by my eyes how much I liked him. Good old Poppy! There’s always plenty of fun when he’s around.

“Can you think of any more good prospects, Jerry?” he grinned.

“Sure thing,” says I, ready to match his nonsense with some of my own clever junk. “There’s the slaughterhouse and the stockyards. It will be a real treat to the bulls to have a globe of goldfish to look at.”

“I know Mr. Carlton,” says Poppy, speaking the name of the local stockyards man. “We ought to sell at least three pairs of mammas and papas to him.”

“How much,” says I, “are the bulls and other customers supposed to cough up for the distinguished privilege of getting on our list of satisfied users?”

“The goldfish, at two hundred dollars a thousand, cost us twenty cents apiece.”

“Which is twice what the variety store charges for them,” I reminded.

“You can’t buy fantails at ten-cent-store prices,” he showed me how well-informed he was.

“Who cares about tails?” I waved him on with a big gesture.

“That’s one of our strongest talking points,” says he.

“People take it for granted,” says I, “that fish have tails. If you were selling cats,” I dished out the brilliant example, “you wouldn’t say: ‘Each one of our pussy cats has a tail.’ Without a tail, a cat wouldn’t be a cat. And it’s the same with fish.”

“I thought at first,” says Poppy, mulling his brains around, “that it would be hard to meet the variety-store competition. But that isn’t worrying me now.”

“Have you marked down the price to nine cents?” says I cheerfully.

“Nine cents is no price,” he gave me a kind of unfriendly look. “We’d be losing money to sell at that figure.”

“Well, what of that,” I grinned, “if we can get the business?”

“Jerry,” says he, “of two pocketknives, one costing ten cents and the other a dollar, which one gets the most attention?”

“The dollar knife, of course.”

“Absolutely,” he waggled. “And what is true of pocketknives,” he added, “is also true of goldfish, and everything else.”

“Meaning which?” says I, eyeing him in anticipation.

“That the price of our goldfish is going to be a dollar each.”

“Good-by,” says I, starting off. “I’ll see you on the thirty-second of December.”

“The big job, of course,” he studied, “will be to find a way of making the Tutter people want to patronize us, at a dollar a throw, instead of favoring the variety store.”

“Dollar goldfish! If I start laughing I’ll never stop. So don’t touch me in the ribs.”

We were now walking down School Street, with the old Warmley homestead just ahead of us, on the left, and beyond that, across Hill Street, Mr. Sam Lung’s corner laundry, where I was supposed to stop and inquire about a pair of B.V.D.’s that had been subtracted from the family washing.

Poppy suddenly ducked into the bushes.

“Come on, Jerry,” he beckoned.

“Where to?”

“The big fountain. I want to see if our mamma goldfish and papa goldfish are getting breakfast for the little goldfish.”

Well, say, all I could do, for a moment or two, as I suddenly got the drift of things, was to stand there and stare.

“Come on,” he beckoned impatiently.

“Just a minute, Poppy,” I got my voice. “Is Mrs. Warmley the old lady who did the kissing act?”

He nodded, grinning.

“And did she put up a poor mouth to you?”

“No. But I saw how things were with her. And to help her out, as I say, I offered to buy the goldfish for two hundred dollars.”

“And has she got the two hundred dollars?”

“Sure thing.” Pausing, he took a curious squint at me. “What’s the matter, Jerry? You look queer.”

“Poppy,” says I soberly, “I hate to tell you the truth. For, as my best pal, it grieves me to humiliate you. But it’s a fact, kid, newcomer that you are around here, Mrs. Warmley played you for a sucker. Poor? Why, she’s the richest woman in the county. She has barrels of money. Everybody who has grown up around here knows that. A miser, Poppy,” I waggled, laying it off with my finger. “That’s what she is.”

The other had his ears stretched.

“Listen!” says he.

From the direction of the big, lonely house, long ago shut in by untrimmed trees and ragged bushes, came the sound of busy hammers.

“It’s the carpenters,” says Poppy, with a kind of happy look, which, as you can imagine, wasn’t the way I had expected him to look at all. “They’re at work on the roof. I promised Mrs. Warmley that I would pick up the old shingles for her, to kindle fires with. So, let’s shake a leg, Jerry. The work won’t take us more than an hour. Then we’ll check up on our goldfish. If there’s more than a thousand,” he concluded earnestly, “we’ll have to pay her extra. For we mustn’t cheat a poor old lady.”