Martin contented himself by picturing his brother-in-law’s surprise on Sunday morning when he opened his Examiner and saw the article on the treasure-hunters.  Early that morning he was out himself to the front door, nervously racing through the many-sheeted newspaper.  He went through it a second time, very carefully, then folded it up and left it where he had found it.  He was glad he had not told any one about his article.  On second thought he concluded that he had been wrong about the speed with which things found their way into newspaper columns.  Besides, there had not been any news value in his article, and most likely the editor would write to him about it first.

After breakfast he went on with his serial.  The words flowed from his pen, though he broke off from the writing frequently to look up definitions in the dictionary or to refer to the rhetoric.  He often read or re-read a chapter at a time, during such pauses; and he consoled himself that while he was not writing the great things he felt to be in him, he was learning composition, at any rate, and training himself to shape up and express his thoughts.  He toiled on till dark, when he went out to the reading-room and explored magazines and weeklies until the place closed at ten o’clock.  This was his programme for a week.  Each day he did three thousand words, and each evening he puzzled his way through the magazines, taking note of the stories, articles, and poems that editors saw fit to publish.  One thing was certain:  What these multitudinous writers did he could do, and only give him time and he would do what they could not do.  He was cheered to read in Book News, in a paragraph on the payment of magazine writers, not that Rudyard Kipling received a dollar per word, but that the minimum rate paid by first-class magazines was two cents a word.  The Youth’s Companion was certainly first class, and at that rate the three thousand words he had written that day would bring him sixty dollars—­two months’ wages on the sea!

On Friday night he finished the serial, twenty-one thousand words long.  At two cents a word, he calculated, that would bring him four hundred and twenty dollars.  Not a bad week’s work.  It was more money than he had ever possessed at one time.  He did not know how he could spend it all.  He had tapped a gold mine.  Where this came from he could always get more.  He planned to buy some more clothes, to subscribe to many magazines, and to buy dozens of reference books that at present he was compelled to go to the library to consult.  And still there was a large portion of the four hundred and twenty dollars unspent.  This worried him until the thought came to him of hiring a servant for Gertrude and of buying a bicycle for Marion.