After dinner and a breath of fresh air, he plunged again into his tasks.  Now he had the scalers’ noon reports to transfer to the tally board.  He was intensely interested by the novelty of it all; but even this early he encountered his old difficulties in the matter of figures.  He made no mistakes, but in order to correlate, remember and transfer correctly he was forced to an utterly disproportionate intensity of application.  To the tally board he brought more absolute concentration and will-power than did Collins to all his manifold tasks.  So evidently painstaking was he, that the little bookkeeper glanced at him sharply once or twice.  However, he said nothing.

When darkness approached the bookkeeper closed his ledger and came over to Bob’s desk.  In ten minutes he ran deftly over Bob’s afternoon work; re-checking the supply invoices, verifying the time checks, comparing the tallies with the scalers’ reports.  So swiftly and accurately did he accomplish this, with so little hesitation and so assured a belief in his own correctness that the really taxing job seemed merely a bit of light mental gymnastics after the day’s work.

“Good!” he complimented Bob; “everything’s correct.”

Bob nodded, a little gloomily.  It might be correct; but he was very tired from the strain of it.

“It’ll come easier with practice,” said Collins; “always difficult to do a new thing.”

The whistle blew.  Bob went directly to his room and sat down on the edge of his bed.  In spite of Collins’s kindly meant reassurances, the iron of doubt had entered his soul.  He had tried for four months, and was no nearer facility than when he started.

“If a man hadn’t learned better than that, I’d have called him a dub and told him to get off the squad,” he said to himself, a little bitterly.  He thought a moment.  “I guess I’m tired.  I must buck up.  If Collins and Archie can do it, I can.  It’s all in the game.  Of course, it takes time and training.  Get in the game!”

IX

This was on Tuesday.  During the rest of the week Bob worked hard.  Even a skilled man would have been kept busy by the multitude of details that poured in on the little office.  Poor Bob was far from skilled.  He felt as awkward amid all these swift and accurate activities as he had when at sixteen it became necessary to force his overgrown frame into a crowded drawing room.  He tried very hard, as he always did with everything.  When Collins succinctly called his attention to a discrepancy in his figurings, he smiled his slow, winning, troubled smile, thrust the hair back from his clear eyes, and bent his lean athlete’s frame again to the labour.  He soon discovered that this work demanded speed as well as accuracy.  “And I need a ten-acre lot to turn around in,” he told himself half humorously.  “I’m a regular ice-wagon.”