XV
Gordon placed on the table before him the statements and accounts of his newly-augmented options. The papers, to his clerical inefficiency, presented a bewildering mass of inexplicable details and accounts. He brought them, with vast difficulty, into a rough order. In the lists of the acreages of timber controlled there were appended none of the names of those from whom his privilege of option had been obtained, no note of the slightly-varying sums paid—the sole, paramount facts to Gordon now. For the establishment of these he was obliged to refer to the original, individual contracts, to compare and add and check off.
Old Pompey had conducted his transactions largely from his buggy, lending them a speciously casual aspect. The options made to him were written on slips of paper hastily torn from a cheap note book, engrossed on yellowing sheets of foolscap in tremulous Spencerian. Their wording was informal, often strictly local. One granted privilege of purchase of, “The piney trees on Pap’s and mine but not Henny’s for nineteen years.” Another bore, above the date, “In this year of Jesus Christ’s holy redemption.”
The sales made to Valentine Simmons were, invariably, formal in record, the signatures were all witnessed.
It was a slow, fatiguing process. A number of the original vendors, Gordon knew, had died, their families were scattered; others had removed from the County; logical substitutes had to be evolved. The mere comparison of the various entries, the tracing of the tracts to the amounts involved, was scarcely within Gordon’s ability.
He labored through the swiftly-falling dusk into the night, and took up the task early the following morning. A large part of the work had to be done a second, third, time—his brain, unaccustomed to concentrated mental processes, soon grew weary; he repeated aloud a fact of figures without the least comprehension of the sounds formed by his lips, and he would say them again and again, until he had forced into his blurring mind some significance, some connection.
He would fall asleep over his table, his scattered papers, in the grey daylight, or in the radiance of a large glass lamp, and stay immobile for hours, while his dog lay at his feet, or, uneasy, nosed his sharp, relaxed knees.
No one would seek him, enter his house, break his exhausted slumbers. Lying on an outflung arm his head with its sunken, closed eyes, loose lips, seemed hardly more alive than the photographed clay of Mrs. Hollidew in the sitting room. He would wake slowly, confused; the dog would lick his inert hand, and they would go together in search of food to the kitchen.