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.