Baxter's Cathedral Pickle

Baxter's Cathedral Pickle

I would have made the first post yesterday but I had to dig up the septic tank for a maintenance pumping first thing. It was still dark when I'd cleared the cap and freed it. A truck went over the hill and I recognized the lights and sound as Baxter's. He's an older local picker and always comes first thing in the morning when he's found something. He finds the something the day before, makes his wife research it on the internet (to the best of their combined abilities) in the evening and sells at dawn. His truck pulled up next to me.
"WHAT …are you DOING?"
"Digging up the septic."
"WHY?"
"Maintenance pumping."
"Now?"
"Now."
He looked at the tank cap, looked at me, look straight out the windshield and turned the truck off. "I GOT SOMETHING YOU WANT!" he said and got out of the truck. That's his usual sales pitch but was a little louder suggesting a concern that my attention might not be centered on him.
He took a wooden box full of bottles out of the truck bed and set it up inside my barn door. He went back to the passenger cab and retrieved another bottle. Waving it at me in the dawn light he said "THIS IS IT". He sat that on the very front of the barn doorway.
I saw right away the bottle was a large cathedral pickle bottle; a tall one. I walked up, picked it up, held the dirty bottle to the dawn light, turned it over and said "How much?"
"Two fifty. Its perfect"
I said nothing, rolled it again and sat it back down, but back from the edge, just inside the barn.
"GOT ALL OF THEM from MISSY ADAMS' PLACE."
We stepped to the wooden box and looked down. They were all old, but plain, pickle bottles. "How much are those?"
"ONE HUNDRED."
I said nothing.
"That one has GOT to be worth two hundred" he said.
"Is that the price?"
Baxter gave me a look I'd seen before. He gets so excited about his find and researching the object's value that he falls apart at selling. That look means that he cannot remember what price he'd quoted me the minute before. He'd been rehearsing the price all the way over in the truck but couldn't recall what he'd actually quoted. "Well… I guess so" he said.
"I'll buy it" I said.