"Major, can you figure?"
It was my inning now, and I liked it, and I was guilty of saying that, within narrow limits, I could.
"Will you do my accounts for me, Major?"
"I will, with pleasure."
Fitz-Adams drew a deep breath, and his voice fell to a lower tone.
"Well, that'll be a good thing for me. I never had no schooling, and Sam the Book-keeper, he don't seem to know much more'n me. I guess I lost pretty nigh on to two thousand dollars on my contracts last year, on account of not knowing how to figure. Say, Major, this is pretty hard work for you; you suit yourself about this work, and help me with the accounts. Of course, I—I—I—didn't know——"
"Oh, drop it, Fitz-Adams!" I said. "We understand each other. I'll be glad to look after the accounts as long as I stay; but it's growing light now, and let's get on this load."
And so I won a place in the camp, and got myself on human terms with the boss. Fitz-Adams never referred to the matter again, but treated me in a perfectly manly, straightforward way, taking patiently my clumsy work as a woodsman, and accepting, as a matter of course, my help with the accounts, and even consulting me, at times, in certain details of the work. It was one of these consultations which brought a rare opportunity.
I had won my way with the boss, not by virtue of an education, but actually upon the basis of an acquaintance with elementary arithmetic. When I came to look at the accounts, it was not a question of book-keeping that was involved, but simple addition and multiplication and division, in all of which branches both Fitz-Adams and Sam the Book-keeper were lamentably weak, so weak, in fact, that they felt no real confidence in their results.
But my way with the men was yet to make. They were not uncivil, but they would none of me. To them I was still an outsider, "an inharmonious figure in their club," and, whatever may have been the change in my relations with the boss, the men were in no way bound to recognize me.