He swung his leg over the arm of his chair and resumed his newspaper.
After a few moments he thrust the crumpled sheet into a huge waste
basket and turned to his desk, where he speedily lost himself in a mass
of letters and papers.
Harvey disappeared. Bob stood for a moment, then took a seat by the
window, where he could look out over the smoky city and catch a glimpse
of the wintry lake beyond. As nothing further occurred for some time, he
removed his overcoat, and gazed about him with interest on the framed
photographs of logging scenes and camps that covered the walls. At the
end of ten minutes Harvey returned from the small outer office. Harvey
was, perhaps, fifty-five years of age, exceeding methodical, very
competent.
"Can you run a typewriter?" he inquired.
"A little," said Bob.
"Well, copy this, with a carbon duplicate."
Bob took the paper Harvey extended to him. He found it to be a list,
including hundreds of items. The first few lines were like this:
Sec. 4 T, 6 N.R., 26 W S.W. 1/4 of N.W. 1/4
4 6 26 N.W. 1/4 of N.W. 1/4
4 6 26 S.W. 1/4 of S.W. 1/4
5 6 26 S.W. 1/4 of N.W. 1/4
5 6 26 S.E. 1/4 of N.W. 1/4
After an interminable sequence, another of the figures would change, or
a single letter of the alphabet would shift. And so on, column after
column. Bob had not the remotest notion of what it all meant, but he
copied it and handed the result to Harvey. In a few moments Harvey
returned.
"Did you verify this?" he asked.
"What?" Bob inquired.
"Verify it, check it over, compare it," snapped Harvey, impatiently.
Bob took the list, and with infinite pains which, nevertheless, could
not prevent him from occasionally losing the place in the bewilderment
of so many similar figures, he managed to discover that he had omitted
three and miscopied two. He corrected these mistakes with ink and
returned the list to Harvey. Harvey looked sourly at the ink marks, and
gave the boy another list to copy.
Bob found this task, which lasted until noon, fully as exhilarating as
the other. When he returned his copies he ventured an inquiry.
"What are these?" he asked.
"Descriptions," snapped Harvey.
In time he managed to reason out the fact that they were descriptions of
land; that each item of the many hundreds meant a separate tract. Thus
the first line of his first copy, translated, would have read as
follows:
"The southwest quarter of the northwest quarter of section number four,
township number six, north, range number twenty-six, west."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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