Then Fox would hang one leg over the arm of his swinging chair, light a
cigar, and enter into desultory conversation. To Bob a great deal of
time seemed thus to be wasted. He did not know that big deals were
decided in apparently casual references to business.
Other lists varied the monotony. After he had finished the tax lists he
had to copy over every description a second time, with additional
statistics opposite each, like this:
S.W. 1/4 of N.W. 1/4, T. 4 N.R., 17, W. Sec. 32,
W.P. 68, N. 16, H. 5.
The last characters translated into: "White pine, 68,000 feet; Norway
pine, 16,000 feet; hemlock, 5,000 feet," and that inventoried the
standing timber on the special forty acres.
And occasionally he tabulated for reference long statistics on how Camp
14 fed its men for 32 cents a day apiece, while Camp 32 got it down to
27 cents.
That was all, absolutely all, except that occasionally they sent him
out to do an errand, or let him copy a wordy contract with a great many
_whereases_ and _wherefores_.
Bob little realized that nine-tenths of this timber--all that wherein S
P (sugar pine) took the place of W P--was in California, belonged to his
own father, and would one day be his.
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