sy, with another grimace at Peaney. "You
put your thousand dollars on the counter, and Mr. Peaney puts five
thousand right beside it. You see it all the time. If you come out
right, you just pick up the money and walk off."

"No!... _Say_! That's slick, hain't it? Wisht you'd come along when we
try, Miss O'Toole. Somehow I'd feel easier in my mind if you was
along.... See you early in the mornin'.... Got to git to bed, now.
Always aim to be in bed by nine.... G' night."

"Say," expostulated Mr. Peaney, "do you expect me to hand over five
thousand to that hick? He might walk off with it."

"He might walk off with the hotel.... I told you you hadn't any
nerve.... Why, give that fat man a taste of easy money and you couldn't
drive him away. Let him sleep all night with five thousand dollars that
came as easy as that, and you couldn't drive him away from your office
with a gun.... Besides, I'm here to take care of him ...or are you a
quitter?"

"Twenty thousand dollars," Mr. Peaney said to himself. "Then I'll show
you how good my nerve is. Bring on your fat man...."

Scattergood was up at his accustomed early hour, and before breakfast
had examined Mr. Peaney's premises from front and rear. The bucket shop
was in a small wooden building. The ground floor consisted of a large
office where was visible the big blackboard upon which stock quotations
were posted, and of a back room whose interior was invisible from the
street. A corner of the main office had been partitioned off as a
private retreat for Mr. Peaney. What was upstairs Scattergood could not
tell with accuracy, but he judged it to be a single room or perhaps two
small rooms.... It was here, he felt certain, Ovid was secreting
himself, and, with a certain grimness, he hoped the young man was not
happy in his surroundings.

"I calc'late," he said to himself, "that Ovid, bein' shet up with his
own figgerin's and imaginin's, hain't in no jubilant frame of mind....
Meanest punishment you kin give a feller is to lock him in for a spell
with himself, callin' himself names...." When the office opened,
Scattergood and Pansy were at the door, where Mr. Peaney welcomed them,
not without a certain uneasiness at the prospect of intrusting his money
to Scattergood.

"Let's git started right off," Scattergood said. "I'd like to tell it to
the folks how I gained five thousand dollars in one mornin'--jest doin'
nothin' but settin'."

"Very well," said Mr. Peaney. "You buy