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‘Armundo?’ Bran looked at Tolly, who merely shrugged his shoulders. ‘Sorry never heard about you before.’
‘And, yeah, that’s our stuff out there. Left it for a trade.’ Tolly pulled out the small ball and shifted it from hand to hand. He was about to ask just what this ‘treasure’ was that Armundo had found, when a voice hailed them from the stairway.
‘Hey! You two!’ Ferdy paused on the steps coming up from the cellar, his face peering over where the wooden floor of the tenement met the stairway. ‘Come on! Daisy’s found some sacks for us.’ He held up a crinkly, plastic bag with the with the words Shop-Smart emblazoned in red across one side. ‘We’re going to try that trick’r’treat thing we saw them doing last year.’ He climbed up two more steps and sat down, grinning through the stairposts. ‘Daisy wants to be one of the ones who asks for treats.’ He held up a carton of eggs in one hand and pulled a piece of soap from his pocket. ‘I’m gonna try my hand at the trick part.’
Ferdy laughed, a merry sort of sound that rang across the room. ‘Remember that big place we saw, the one with the moving pictures? Well, Bilbo and Frodo’s books, it seems, have been done up in that way. Or so Daisy said she’d heard from someone. Imagine that! Well, anyways, her friend says the big folk are quite fond of the Hobbits from the stories. So that’s what we’re going out as tonight. Ourselves…..’ He burst out laughing, thinking about pretending to be what they really were.
Ferdy came on up the steps, stopping short as he reached the top. ‘Hey! Who’s that with you?’ he asked, a suspicious look on his face. ‘You know him?’
Bran and Tolly shrugged their shoulders, not really wanting to get into the whole story of how they’d ‘met’ Armundo. ‘Sort of,’ they gave as a grudging answer.
Tolly turned to Armundo, an expectant look on his face. ‘Well, you want to come along?’
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