Читать книгу Poppy Ott's Seven-League Stilts - Edward Edson Lee - Страница 5

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The following morning I meandered down Elm Street to Poppy’s house to see if his night’s rest had benefited him any. For sometimes sleep does drive the cobwebs out of a fellow’s head. However, I was prepared for the worst.

“Well,” says I, coming into the back yard where the world’s youngest advertising specialist was hard at work in the shade of a crab-apple tree, “how’s the Whirligig business this morning?”

He stopped working and skimmed the sweat from his dripping forehead. I saw then that he was sandpapering a strip of Georgia pine. Another similar strip stood against the tree.

“Jerry,” says he, “what is it that a boy wants that he can’t buy in a toy store?”

“A baby elephant,” says I promptly.

“Aw! . . .” he scowled. “Can’t you ever talk sense?”

“Not when I’m talking to you,” says I, after which clever little come-back I let out my neck at the wooden strip that the president and general manager of the Tutter Advertising Novelty Company was favoring with his valuable attention. “What is it?” says I. “The left lung of one of the double-jointed whirligigs that we’re going to peddle from coast to coast?”

“You haven’t answered my question yet,” says he, steady-like.

I screwed up my forehead.

“And you say it isn’t a baby elephant?”

“An elephant isn’t a toy—it’s a pet.”

“A toy,” says I, thinking. Then I looked at him. “Have I got one?”

“Sure thing. But you didn’t buy it.”

“Who did buy it?—my folks?”

“No one bought it. You made it.”

I laughed.

“Mother says the only thing I make around our house is a racket.”

“Guess.”

“A sling-shot?”

“No.”

“A doghouse?”

“No.”

“I give up.”

“Stilts,” says he, grinning.

“I said stilts.”

“Like fun you did—you big bluffer!”

I saw then what the two wooden strips were for. He was making a pair of stilts.

“There never was a boy,” says he, tuning in on some more of his business stuff, “who didn’t like to walk on stilts. You know that. Stilt walking is fun. But, strange to say, no one interested in toys for boys ever thought of manufacturing stilts for the trade. At least I never saw a pair of stilts on sale. Did you?”

“A boy would rather build his own stilts,” says I.

“You really think so?”

“I know so.”

“But you’d rather have a store coaster wagon than a home-made one, wouldn’t you?”

“Of course.”

“Why?”

“Because the store coaster is better made.”

“That’s it exactly,” and he clinched the point with a bob of his head. “People who make a business of manufacturing coaster wagons can do a much better job on a wagon than a boy can. And so it will be with our stilts. Home-made stilts won’t look good to a boy after he sees our Seven-League stilts.”

I gave him a quick look.

“Where did you get that name?” says I.

“Oh, it just came to me.”

I sat down then.

“Poppy,” says I, quiet-like, “I’m going to open up my heart to you and tell you something.”

“Yes?” says he, looking at me curiously.

“I’m going to make a confession to you.”

“Shoot,” says he, grinning.

“Yesterday I thought you were cuckoo. But to-day I think you’re only half cuckoo.”

“Thanks,” says he, laughing.

“Furthermore,” says I, “I’m beginning to wonder, in my growing appreciation of your talents, if it isn’t me who’s cuckoo instead of you. Seven-League stilts! That’s a peachy name. It took brains to think it up. Yet you did it without my help!”

His eyes were shining like peeled onions in my warm praise. And seeing how earnestly he took me, I became ashamed of myself for having poked fun at him. I told myself that I wouldn’t ever do it again. I’d have more faith in him after this. For he was one pal in a million.

“We’ll paint them a bright red,” says he, running his fingers lovingly up and down the two strips. “For red is a boy’s favorite color.”

“They’ll look swell,” says I.

“Won’t they though!” he enthused, his eyes dancing. “And we’ll letter the name on the side—Seven-League Stilts.”

“How did you happen to think of that name?” I asked him again.

“Oh, I lay in bed last night sort of checking off in my mind the different kinds of toys boys had. First I checked off my own stuff. Then I went through your stuff. Stilts! There, says I, thinking of your stilts, is a toy that we can manufacture. Easy. It’s just the thing we need for our advertising novelty scheme. Red stilts, with a catchy name. I remembered then about the ogre’s seven-league boots. You’ve heard the story—every kid has. Seven-League Stilts! No trouble to remember that name, I told myself. And it was a name that fitted the article, too.”

I laughed.

“Maybe we ought to call our company the Tutter Stilt Company.”

“No,” says he, shaking his head, “I think the other name is the best. For later on we may want to bring out other toys. And if we called ourselves the Tutter Stilt Company the trade might get the idea that stilts were the only thing we manufactured.”

Here I was shown the adjustment that the stilt builder had rigged up for raising and lowering the steps.

“That’s a new wrinkle,” says I, examining the contrivance. “I made my steps rigid.”

“So you see, Jerry,” says he quickly, “how easily we can build better stilts for boys than they can build for themselves. For we can work to a patented design.”

“What?” says I. “Get a patent on a pair of stilts? Why, stilts are as old as the hills. And you can’t patent old things, can you?”

“I don’t know very much about patents,” he admitted. “But it would seem to me that we ought to be able to get a patent on our step lock. For that’s a new feature.”

“We’ll be out of luck,” says I, after a moment’s thought, “if we can’t get a patent. For as soon as our business starts earning money some other manufacturer will copy after us.”

“The thing to do, I guess, is to see a lawyer. However,” he added quickly, “we won’t do that to-day. It’s more important to finish this job.”

The step lock that the woodworker had rigged up for his stilts was a sort of two-bolt arrangement. By loosening the bolts the stilt steps could be raised and lowered. The bolts were locked in the steps and there were holes in the stilt shafts for the bolts to go through. So that you will understand just what I’m talking about I’ll draw it out for you on the next page.

Well, we finished the stilts that morning and painted them. Boy, they, sure did look nifty. I could hardly wait for them to dry, so anxious was I to try them out.

“To-morrow morning,” says Poppy, in planning things, “we’ll go over to Ashton and get our first stilt order.”

I laughed.

“It won’t be much of an order,” says I. “For we’ve got only one pair to sell.”

“Oh,” says he quickly, “we won’t sell this pair.”

“No?”

“This is our selling sample.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“We carry the sample along to show the storekeepers what our stilts are like. See? And they order from the sample.”

“It sounds easy to hear you tell it.”

“If we can get an order, Jerry, it is going to help us at the bank.”

“I get you.”

“And two orders, of course, will be better than one. So, while we are at it, we may go on to Steam Corners and try our luck there. Later on, as I say, we’ll stay at home and manage the business and do our selling with advertising.”

A DRAWING OF POPPY OTT’S SEVEN-LEAGUE STILTS

“Why not go on to Chicago,” says I, grinning, “and get three orders? Maybe the Boston Store will buy a whole carload of our stilts.”

That started him to day-dreaming again.

“Jerry, I like to think of the time when we’ll be getting carload orders.”

“I was just joking,” I told him quickly.

“I know you were. But just the same the day is coming when we will be selling our stilts in carload lots.”

“How many pairs to the car?” says I.

“Oh, ten or twelve thousand.”

“And how much a pair?”

“Fifty cents.”

I did some quick figuring.

“Six thousand dollars,” I whistled.

“Sounds like a lot of money, hey?”

“It’s a fortune,” says I.

“You must remember, though, that the six thousand dollars isn’t all profit. The wood for the stilts will take a pile of money. And we’ll have to pay our men.”

“What men?”

“The workmen in our factory.”

“I didn’t know that we were going to hire workmen.”

“You poor fish! Do you think for one minute that we could build six thousand pairs of stilts ourselves? It would take us a dozen years.”

I was beginning to get dizzy again.

“I’m afraid I wasn’t cut out for a business man,” says I. “So you had better call it your business and let me be the office boy.”

“Not so you can notice it. This is a fifty-fifty proposition. If we go up, we go up together. And if we go down—”

“They telephone for the ambulance, hey?”

“I shouldn’t have said that,” came quickly. “For we aren’t going to fail. I won’t think of failure for a moment.”

And now, while our stilts are drying, as it were, I’ll tell you who Poppy is and where he came from. Nicholas Carter Sherlock Holmes Ott! That was the name they hung on him when he was born. It was his father’s work, he told me. The other name—Poppy—he got from peddling popcorn.

In another book, Poppy Ott and the Stuttering Parrot, I wrote down how we solved the weird mystery of Cap’n Tinkertop’s strange black parrot. Poppy was the leader in the surprising adventure. I was his chief lieutenant. If you have read any of the “Jerry Todd” books you know who I am. Yah, I’m the wonderful (?) Jerry Todd himself.

After me, on Poppy’s illustrious detective staff, came the invincible Scoop Ellery—a good kid to know, I should whisper to you, for his father runs a general store in Tutter, which means a lot of free chewing gum for the honorable young Mr. Todd and his gang. After Scoop came Peg Shaw and Red Meyers, the concluding members of Detective Ott’s staff of—ahem!—near-famous sleuths. However, in this story you can practically forget about the other three fellows, for at the time this happened they were earning spending money on Red’s uncle’s farm hoeing rubber plants—or maybe it was pumpkins. Anyway, that isn’t an important point.

To go back to Poppy, Red and I ran across the strange boy one summer morning in a shady place on the edge of town where tramps hang out. Dressed raggedly, with dirty bare feet, we thought at first that he was a kid tramp. But we took a liking to him, even though he was dirty and shabbily dressed. Later on we came to know his father, a queer-acting, absent-minded old man who had the silly idea in his head that he was a second edition of the world-famous Sherlock Holmes. I could tell you some very funny things about Mr. Ott in connection with his silly “detective” work. As a sleuth he sure was a lemon. In working on the black-parrot mystery we put it all over him. The two Otts, father and son, owned a rickety bungalow wagon. The wagon went to pieces in Tutter, or, rather, Poppy knocked the wheels to pieces so that he could stay in our town and go to school with us. To-day the Otts, in better circumstances, live in a small house in Elm Street, close to the idle carriage factory. We like to go to Poppy’s house. We always have fun there. A widower, and his own housekeeper, Mr. Ott never kicks on our racket. If we want to pop corn we go ahead and pop it—it’s all right with him. Or we can do any kind of cooking or play any kind of a game in the house that we choose. When he gets his nose buried in a detective book (and it was in honor of his two favorite detective heroes that his son had been given the stretched-out name of Nicholas Carter Sherlock Holmes Ott) he forgets everything else. We could tear the house down, I guess, without him noticing that anything out of the ordinary was going on.

For a while after coming to Tutter to live the old detective worked in a brickyard. But he didn’t like that job. And learning that a gardener was needed at the big brick house on Main Street, he went there to work.

It was partly through Mr. Ott that we came to know Mrs. Fillingham. And it was through the carriage manufacturer’s elderly housekeeper that we later heard the old spiritualist’s weird story.

Br-r-r-r! Talk about a spooky mystery! I bet you’ll shiver when I come to it.