Tempted by the hammer laid next to the porker, one by one Cody extracted the coins out of his piggy bank. Smashing the pig's head would have been tempting, if the sheriff wasn't watching his every movement.

The curious youngster seperated the coins into piles, one each for quarters, dimes, nickels, and those pesky copper pennies he detested. Cody told himself, "They all add up." He decided he would keep them.

Cody noticed the quarters and dimes, the larger denominations, contained ridges. He laughed and stated, "So do Ruffles potato chips!" He'd heard that on their television commercials.

He examined a nickel and a cent piece and commented, "That's peculiar."

"What?" Sheriff Daniels wanted to know.

"These two don't have ridges," Cody replied.

"Open your book on stamping coins and tell me why that is, Bright Eyes," the sheriff said.

Cody flipped through the pages of the guide on coin collecting until he discovered the answer. He glanced at the sheriff and read out loud, "Back in the days when coins were stamped in different weights to reflect the true value of each coin, and to keep people from shaving their edges or melting them into new coins, minters placed ridges on coins made out of precious metals so it would be easy to detect if their edges had been shaved off. That is why coins still have edges today. Even the CEC can't ban that like they did me."

"You learned something new, didn't cha?" Sheriff Daniels asked. "Now, put your coins back in your piggy bank. And, a, don't smash it to smithereens with that claw hammer doing so."

Cody picked up the coins and dropped them through the slot in the pink pig's back. In silence, he counted their total value to himself...eleven dollars and eighty-three cents. Seventeen cents short of his age. He wondered if the sheriff had a chore he could do to make up the difference.