Five Hundred Dollars

Bert Barton is a teenage boy in the town of Lakeville, getting by with his mother after his father disappeared years earlier under a false charge of theft. Bert pegs shoes in the factory of his prosperous, hard-hearted relative Albert Marlowe until new machinery costs him the job. Into this arrives elderly Jacob Marlowe, home from California far poorer than the family had hoped, his fortune lost to worthless mining stocks. When Bert himself is framed for a theft he did not commit, he must prove his honesty and slowly untangle the old debt and the secret that bind the Marlowes together. Alger sets steady work and plain decency against inherited money and quiet scheming, in the moral style that shaped American boys’ fiction of the late nineteenth century.