"It makes an expensive smoke," smiled Jack, settling back to the enjoyment of the cigarette, "but after all, as long as I have the money, why not enjoy myself? Will you join me?"

He took up his pen as though to make another.

"No, no, no!" cried the ogre, walking agitatedly up and down the floor.

"I--er--I'm afraid it's too soon after breakfast for me. Do you mean to tell me that such an inexhaustible treasure as this really exists?"

"There it is, right before your eyes," said Jack. "Suppose we test it.

Think of a large sum of money, tell me what it is, and see if I can't go you a dollar better."

"Four hundred millions!" cried the ogre, impulsively.

"Piker!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Jack, with a smile, as he drew his check for $400,000,001.

"A billion and a half!" cried the ogre.

"Now you're beginning to get your pace," laughed Jack. "There's my check, sir, for $1,500,000,001, according to specifications."

"That reduces your balance some, though," said the ogre.

"Yes," said Jack. "It reduces it by $1,900,000,002, leaving me with only $3,573,574,999,998 on hand, but if I affix six ciphers to that, as I will now proceed to do, I have, as the figures conclusively show, $3,575,574,999,998,000,000, or about a squillion more than I had before I began to draw."

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE OGRE COLLAPSED IN HIS CHAIR]

The ogre collapsed in his chair. The magnitude of these figures appalled him.

"Great glory!" he cried. "I didn't know there was that much money in the world. Can--can anybody work that book?"

"Anybody who comes by it honestly and without trickery," said Jack. "Of course, if a man gets hold of it in an unscrupulous way, or goes back on his bargain, it's as valueless to him as so much waste paper."

The ogre strode up and down the room, filled with agitation. He had thought to trick the boy out of his wonderful possession--in fact, to swallow him whole and then appropriate his treasure, but Jack's explanation put an entirely new phase on the matter.

"I suppose you wouldn't part with that book?" he finally asked.

"Yes," said Jack. "I'll let you have it if you will transfer all your property irrevocably to your stepdaughter, Beanhilda, and give me her hand in marriage."

"It's a bargain!" gulped the ogre, whereupon he summoned his lawyers and his secretaries, and by noon all his possessions had pa.s.sed beyond recall into the hands of Beanhilda. A special messenger was sent down the bean-stalk to fetch Jack's mother, and that afternoon the happy lad and the fair Princess of Ogreville were married with much pomp and ceremony.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "BLESS YOU, MY CHILDREN!"]

"Bless you, my children!" murmured the ogre, as the irrevocable words were spoken by the priest, and Jack pa.s.sed the magic check-book over to its new owner. "May you live long and happily. As for me, I'm off for a week's vacation in little old New York."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "A WEEK'S VACATION IN LITTLE OLD NEW YORK"]

"How did you manage it, sweetheart?" whispered Beanhilda in her husband's ear a few weeks later. "Step-papa had such a penchant for hard-boiled boys that I feared you were lost the moment he appeared."

Jack explained the whole history of the magic check-book to her, but when he had done, his bride grew white.

"But what if he comes back?" she cried, shuddering with fear. "His vengeance will be terrible."

"Have no fear, Beanhilda," Jack answered. "He will not return. Read that."

And he handed her an evening paper in which, with rapidly drying eyes, she read the following:

SEVENTY-FIVE YEARS FOR Pa.s.sING BAD CHECKS

William J. Ogre, claiming to be a prominent resident of Ogreville, who was arrested at the St. Gotham Hotel last Thursday afternoon on a charge of having pa.s.sed a dozen bogus checks for amounts ranging from ten to fifteen thousand dollars apiece, was found guilty yesterday by a jury in the criminal branch of the United States Circuit Court. He was sentenced to fifteen years' imprisonment at hard labor in the Federal Prison at Thomasville, Georgia, on each of the five different counts, making his prison term in all not less than seventy-five years. Other indictments are still pending against him for forgery on the complaint of Major Bilkins, president of the Suburban Trust Company, of whose name he was found availing himself in his criminal transactions. Major Bilkins, when seen last night by a reporter of this paper, stated his intention of keeping the shameless operator in jail for the rest of his natural life.

"I shouldn't sit up for papa if I were you, Beanhilda," said Jack, with a smile. "It looks to me as if he was going to be detained down-town late on business."

And the young couple lived happily forever after.

II

THE GREAT WISH SYNDICATE

The farm had gone to ruin. On every side the pastures were filled with a rank growth of thistles and other thorn-bearing flora. The farm buildings had fallen into a condition of hopeless disrepair, and the old house, the ancestral home of the Wilbrahams, had become a place of appalling desolation. The roof had been patched and repatched for decades, and now fulfilled none of the ideals of its roofhood save that of antiquity. There was not, as far as the eye could see, a single whole pane of gla.s.s in any one of the many windows of the mansion, and there were not wanting those in the community who were willing to prophesy that in a stiff gale--such as used to be prevalent in that section of the world, and within the recollection of some of the old settlers too--the chimneys, once the pride of the county, would totter and fall, bringing the whole mansion down into chaos and ruin. In short, the one-time model farm of the Wilbrahams had become a by-word and a jest and, as some said, of no earthly use save for the particular purposes of the eccentric artist in search of picturesque subject-matter for his studies in oil.

[Ill.u.s.tration: WITHIN THE ANCIENT HOUSE SAT THE OWNER, RICHARD WILBRAHAM]

It was a wild night, and within the ancient house sat the owner, Richard Wilbraham, his wife not far away, trying to find room upon her husband's last remaining pair of socks to darn them. Wilbraham gazed silently into the glowing embers on the hearth before them, the stillness of the evening broken only by the hissing of the logs on the andirons and an occasional sigh from one of the watchers.

Finally the woman spoke.

"When does the mortgage fall due, Richard?" she asked, moving uneasily in her chair.

"To-morrow," gulped the man, the word seeming to catch in his throat and choke him.

"And you--you are sure Colonel Digby will not renew it?" she queried.

"He even declines to discuss the matter," said Wilbraham. "He contents himself with shaking it in my face every time I approach his office, while he tells his office-boy to escort me to the door. I don't believe in signs, Ethelinda, but I do believe that that is an omen that if the money is not forthcoming at noon to-morrow you and I will be roofless by this time to-morrow night."

The woman shuddered.

"But, Richard," she protested, "you--you had put by the money to pay it long ago. What has become of it?"

"Gone, Ethelinda--gone in that ill-advised egg deal I tried to put through two years ago," sighed Wilbraham, as he buried his face in his hands to hide his grief and mortification. "I sold eggs short," he added. "You remember when that first batch of incubator hens began laying so prolifically--it seemed to me as though Fortune stared me in the face--nay, held out her hands to me and bade me welcome to a share in her vast estates. There was a great shortage of eggs in the market that year, and I went to New York and sold them by the dozens--hundreds of dozens--thousands of dozens--"

He rose up from his chair and paced the floor in an ecstasy of agitation. "I sold eggs by the million, Ethelinda," he went on, by a great effort regaining control of himself. "Eggs to be laid by hens whose great-great-great-grandmothers had yet to be hatched from eggs yet unlaid by unborn chickens."

Wilbraham's voice sank to a hoa.r.s.e, guttural whisper.

"And the deliveries have bankrupted me," he muttered. "The price of eggs has risen steadily for the past eighteen months, and yesterday a hundred thousand of January, strictly fresh, that I had to buy in the open market in order to fill my contracts, cost me not only my last penny, but were in part paid for with a sixty-day note that I cannot hope to meet. In other words, Ethelinda, we are ruined."