The Rules of the Game | Page 4

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safe, some letter files, and two bookkeepers. Then, without challenge,
he walked directly into a large apartment, furnished as simply, with
another safe, a typewriter, several chairs, and a large roll-top desk. At
the latter a man sprawled, reading a newspaper. Bob looked about for a
further door closed on an inner private office, where the weighty
business must be transacted. There was none. The tall, broad, lean
young man hesitated, looking about him with a puzzled expression in
his earnest young eyes. Could this be the heart and centre of those vast
and far-reaching activities he had heard so much about?
After a moment the man in the revolving chair looked up shrewdly over
his paper. Bob felt himself the object of an instant's searching scrutiny
from a pair of elderly steel-gray eyes.
"Well?" said the man, briefly.
"I am looking for Mr. Fox," explained Bob.
"I am Fox."
The young man moved forward his great frame with the easy,
loose-jointed grace of the trained athlete. Without comment he handed
his card of introduction to the seated man. The latter glanced at it, then
back to the young fellow before him.
"Glad to see you, Mr. Orde," he unbent slightly. "I've been expecting
you. If you're as good a man as your father, you'll succeed. If you're not
as good a man as your father, you may get on--well enough. But you've
got to be some good on your own account. We'll see." He raised his
voice slightly. "Jim!" he called.

One of the two bookkeepers appeared in the doorway.
"This is young Mr. Orde," Fox told him. "You knew his father at
Monrovia and Redding."
The bookkeeper examined Bob dispassionately.
"Harvey is our head man here," went on Fox. "He'll take charge of
you."
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."
--And that it represented forty acres of timber land. The stupendous
nature of such holdings made him gasp, and he gasped again when he
realized that each of his mistakes meant the misplacement on the map
of enough for a good-sized farm. Nevertheless, as day succeeded day,
and the lists had no end, the mistakes became more difficult to