CHAPTER III

AN EXTRAORDINARY LEGACY

“Perhaps the best way, Bab, to find out what the lawyer has to say to you is to read your letter and find out,” suggested Gerry Thompson.

But Bab Winters was not listening to her chum. She was already deep in the letter--a letter which comprised several sheets of interesting-looking manuscript.

“It isn’t some one suing you, I hope,” said Gerry to Bab’s averted fair head. “Or a summons to court,” pensively. “Or some one dunning you for money. It isn’t anything like that, is it, Bab?”

“No.” Bab’s glance went beyond Gerry to meet her grandmother’s steady eyes. “It’s--why, Granny dear, I believe it’s a will!”

Gerry reached over and made a swift snatch at the papers, at the imminent risk of tearing them to pieces. She read, in a queer, catchy voice:

“‘Last Will and Testament of Jeremiah Dare.’ Oh, Bab!” she added wildly, “you’ve gone and been left a million dollars by that somebody with a funny name. You can have a big house up on the hill and give huge dinner parties----”

“Wait! Wait!” cried Bab.

She took the papers from Gerry and began searching feverishly in the envelope. “There must be a letter with this. Oh, yes--here it is!”

“From the lawyers?” asked Mrs. Winters in a quiet voice.

Bab nodded.

“Listen!” she commanded.

Gerry listened, wide-eyed and intensely thrilled, while Bab read the first legal communication she had ever received.

“Miss Barbara Winters,” it began. “Dear Madam----”

Gerry giggled.

“All grown up of a sudden, aren’t you, Bab?”

“Your uncle, Jeremiah Dare---- Goodness!” ejaculated Bab, and again looked across at Granny. “I’d nearly forgotten there was such a person. Poor old man! Rosa Lee used to frighten me with him when I was a little thing.” Rosa Lee had been Barbara’s nurse during the days of her little girlhood.

Mrs. Winters nodded. Gerry cried impatiently:

“Read on! Read on!”

“‘Your uncle, Jeremiah Dare, having died and left you his estate,’” Bab complied, “‘we hereby notify you to that effect.’”

“Oh, Bab, how much?” breathed Gerry. “_Is_ it a million dollars?”

But Bab, skimming over the legal phrasing, extracting the meat from the communication, informed them that it was not a million dollars at all. In fact--the disheartening fact stood starkly revealed--this remarkable inheritance was practically worthless!

“Let me see!” cried Gerry, unwilling to trust to Bab. “You must have overlooked something important, Babs.”

But after a few moments of scowling scrutiny, Gerry flung the document from her, as though to intimate that she was through with it forever.

“Then all you get,” she cried wrathfully, “is a miserable little five hundred dollars and a miserable, tumble-down shack in the woods. Bab, I’ll never get over this!”

In response to a gesture from her grandmother, Bab picked up the document and handed it to her. She watched sadly, a lump in her throat, as Granny adjusted her spectacles upon her nose. If only queer old Uncle Jeremiah had left her a real fortune, something that would have smoothed away all difficulties for her grandparents, making them secure for the rest of their lives! Bab felt foolish tears of disappointment burn behind her eyelids.

“Oh, well,” she said bravely, “five hundred dollars is five hundred dollars and a good deal better than nothing. As for the house, it may not be in bad condition at all.”

“You might be able to sell it and get something for it,” Gerry admitted. “But what a come-down, and when I had my heart all set on at least a million dollars!”

“I don’t know why you should have set your heart on any such thing,” said Bab stoutly. “From what I’ve heard of my queer old Uncle Jeremiah Dare, he was anything but a rich man. Granny!” she added quickly. Her grandmother was nodding and smiling--actually smiling!--over the will. “What do you find that’s funny?”

“Something you evidently haven’t read at all,” replied Mrs. Winters in the same quiet voice. “And I was laughing because the whole thing seems so entirely like Jeremiah.”

She handed the will back into Bab’s eager fingers.

“Did you read the codicil?” she asked.

“Codicil?” repeated Bab vaguely. She had only the haziest idea what a codicil was.

But Mrs. Winters pointed out a short paragraph at the very end of the will.

“Read that,” she commanded.

Bab frowned as she read. Then suddenly her eyes brightened, for the codicil to this extraordinary will was stranger than the will itself.

She read and reread it, striving to make some sense from the mysterious wording of it, while her eyes grew brighter and the hand that held the paper quivered a little with eagerness.

Gerry had, for some time, been regarding her with lively interest. Now she broke in impatiently.

“What are you laughing to yourself about, Bab Winters?” she inquired. “If there is a joke I think you and Granny are mean to enjoy it between you and leave me out of it. It’s positively impolite!”

“I don’t know,” cried Barbara breathlessly, “but what this whole thing may be a joke on me. Listen while I read this. ‘Only to one with courage and a desire for adventure----’”

“That’s me!” interrupted Gerry irrepressibly.

“‘--will the old house yield up its treasure,’” continued Bab. “‘It has been my experience that money, unearned, is harmful to the soul.’ Now what do you think of that?” She put the paper down and looked at them.

“Think of it!” cried Gerry joyfully. “Why, Bab, it’s priceless, immense, glorious! You can see what the old boy means, can’t you?”

Her eyes on her grandmother, Bab slowly shook her head.

“I can’t see----”

“Why,” Gerry rushed on, “your Uncle What’s-his-name has buried a treasure or something in that old house and the codicil thing is just a bid for you to come on and dig it up--the treasure, I mean--not the codicil!”

“If that’s really what he meant, then I must say he had a sense of humor,” said Bab dubiously.

“No!” It was Mrs. Winters who spoke, and her quiet, sweetly modulated voice won instant attention from the girls. “Your Uncle Jeremiah Dare was the last one in the world, Bab, that I would connect with a genuine sense of humor. A queer, lonely old man, eccentric, notional. This leaving his property to you is just one more queer act in a life of queer actions. Your mother had occasion to be good to him once--perhaps that is why he thought of you at the end.”

“But this--this codicil thing!” cried Bab, fairly stammering in her eagerness. “What do you think of that, Granny? Doesn’t it look rather--mysterious?”

“Yes, it is odd, of course.” Mrs. Winters adjusted her spectacles and read the codicil again. “But then, as I said before, Jeremiah always was queer. He traveled a great deal in his earlier days. Later on he settled down in that old house in the country and lived, so people said, almost the life of a hermit.”

“Was he a miser?” asked Gerry intensely.

Mrs. Winters looked at the girl and smiled indulgently.

“I shouldn’t wonder if he were, my dear,” she said.

“Then,” said Gerry triumphantly, “that settles it!”

“Settles what?” asked Bab.

“The question, of course,” retorted her chum. “If your Uncle What’s-his-name was really a miser, Bab, then he kept all his money right in the house with him. Misers always do.”

“Then I suppose he buried his money and left it for me to find--provided I’m smart enough!” added Bab. “But it sounds so silly. Why should he go to all the trouble of hiding the money--if there is any--when it would have been ever so much easier just to leave it in the bank with the other five hundred?”

“Why, don’t you see?” cried Gerry, with an excited giggle. “The codicil explains everything. Doesn’t it say, ‘Money, unearned, is harmful to the soul’?”

“I wonder!” cried Bab softly.

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