Excerpt
ALMOST A FORTUNE
"Oh, Dad, I can't believe it's true!"
In the rather dim light of the gloomy old room the boys and girls looked queer—almost ghostly. They were gathered about a shabby old trunk, and beside this trunk a man was kneeling. As Billie Bradley spoke, the man, who was her father, rose to his feet and thoughtfully brushed the dust from his clothes. Then he stood looking down at the hundreds and hundreds of postage stamps and old coins that filled the queer old trunk.
"Is it really true, Dad?" Billie continued, shaking her father's arm impatiently while the other young folks looked eagerly up at him.
Mr. Bradley nodded slowly.
"Yes, you really have made a find this time, Billie," he said. "Of course I'm not an expert, but I'm sure the coins in that old trunk are worth three thousand dollars, and the postage stamps ought to bring at least two thousand more——"
"At least two thousand more!" broke in Chet Bradley, excitedly. "Does that mean that Billie may get more for the postage stamps?"
"I shouldn't wonder," replied Mr. Bradley, nodding his head. "However," he added, smiling round at the girls and boys, "you'd better not count on anything over five thousand."
"But five thousand dollars!" interrupted Laura Jordon, in an awed voice. "Just think of it, Billie! And because your Aunt Beatrice left you this house and everything in it, every last cent of that five thousand belongs to you."
"Yes," said Teddy Jordon, turning to Billie with a chuckle. "I suppose you won't look at any of us now you've got this money. How does it feel, Billie?"
"I—I don't know, yet," stammered Billie, still staring at the wonderful trunk. "You'll just have to give me time to get used to it, that's all."
As those readers who have read the first book of this series, entitled "Billie Bradley and Her Inheritance," will probably have gathered, the girls, Billie Bradley, Laura Jordon and Violet Farrington, and their boy relatives and chums, Chet Bradley, Ferd Stowing and Teddy Jordon, were still at the old homestead at Cherry Corners where so many weird and mysterious experiences had befallen them.
For the benefit of those who are meeting the girls and boys for the first time, what had happened up to the time of this story will be sketched over briefly.
The young folks had grown up in North Bend, a town of perhaps twenty thousand people, and about forty miles by rail from New York City. The girls had seen the great metropolis several times, though their visits had been all too short to satisfy their eager curiosity.
Billie Bradley was called the most popular girl in North Bend, and, indeed, after one had been with Billie five minutes, one would never again wonder where she got the title.
Whether it was her sparkling brown eyes with the imp of mischief always lurking in them, or her merry laugh that made every one want to laugh with her, or the adventurous spirit that made her eager to embark on any kind of lark, it would be hard to tell—perhaps her popularity arose from a combination of all of these....