Free Guardian of the Green Hill by Laura L. Sullivan Page A

him the strangers might be fairies in disguise. Well, it was certainly likely here. He smoothed out one last rough spot on the stick and left the wagon for its owner. Finn whistled as he walked down the lane, wanting to look back but respecting the little guy’s shyness. He just smiled to himself. He felt unaccountably good, which as a rule happened only when he did something self-serving.
    He had just gotten out of sight when he stumbled over a hemp bag. “Hey, kid, is this yours?” Finn shouted back over his shoulder, but there was no answer. He called out several times before he looked more closely and saw roughly scratched into the dirt the words FER YE .
    â€œFor me?” he asked. Had the little boy left him some personal treasure of marbles or chewing gum to thank him for his help? “Gee, you didn’t have to do that,” said Finn, warming.
    He pulled the frayed and twisted cord open and felt inside the unusually heavy bag. On top was crinkling paper, and as he pulled that out, he felt something hard and knobbly beneath it. The paper turned out to be money of some sort. On one side was a pleasant-looking maternal woman in a short, spiky crown, who could be no other than Queen Elizabeth, and on the back was a bushy-bearded man who might have been the writer Anthony Trollope but you could guess from the ship, flowers, bird, and magnifying glass was more likely Charles Darwin. From the large 10 in the corners, Finn determined it must be a ten-pound note. Unless the poor dollar had fallen farther since he arrived in England, his bill was worth about twenty dollars.
    There was no bank in Gladysmere, and he had no way of getting to a bigger town, so Finn had been unable to make use of the bank account and checkbook his parents had set up for him. It is even more remarkable, then, that he didn’t instantly count himself lucky and pocket the money.
    â€œLittle boy!” he called out, heading back to where he’d left the wagon. “Come out! Where are you? You can’t give this to me, it’s too much.” He waved the bill around to the empty woods. Imagine, some little child giving him twenty dollars. Even if he was well off, it had to be all his pocket money for weeks.
    â€œI’m staying at the Rookery,” he said loudly to no one. “If you change your mind, you can have it back.” As soon as he said that he was sorry. He was already thinking how to spend it.
    He slipped the bill in his pocket and immediately felt his hip sink. It felt like someone had strapped a bowling ball to his side. His whole body tilted, and he could hardly stand upright. He thought at first he might have dislocated his hip, but how? Then he thought maybe his foot had caught on something and was pulling him back. But no, it wasn’t any pull but that of gravity—it was a weight. It had happened as soon as he put the bill in his pocket. He took it out again, and the weight vanished. The bill was as light as a hummingbird feather in his hand. He looked at it quizzically and put it back in his pocket. At once he was weighted down as if with a dangling ball and chain. He tried the experiment again and finally was forced to conclude that the flimsy piece of paper in his hand suddenly weighed a great deal more when in his pocket. It must have weighed … he burst out laughing even as horripilations danced on his forearms. Ten pounds. The ten-pound note weighed ten pounds!
    His first instinct was to throw the unnatural thing to the ground, but a healthy respect for money (some might call it greed) made him keep it. It must be a magic bill of some kind. He looked around warily. Surely it had been a little boy he heard, not a fairy. Well, perhaps the boy had gotten the bill from a fairy. He chuckled. What had seemed incredible generosity was instead probably just getting rid of a cumbersome burden. Tiny as that chap sounded, it must have been well nigh impossible to carry around a