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.
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