A gust of cold wind suddenly blew in through the front door, sweeping over Ruff Dad, who sat at an angle to it. He shivered involuntarily, and his hand trembled, sending his pen skidding across the half-written page and leaving a long streak.
"Damn it!" Ruff Dad cursed. Looking up, he saw that the front door had somehow blown wide enough to leave a large gap. He hurried over and shut it firmly.
"That damned woman couldn't even close the door properly when she left."
Muttering another curse, Ruff Dad returned to his desk.
Seeing how that stroke had ruined the page, he cursed again, crumpled it into a ball, and tossed it into the trash can beside him before lowering his head and getting back to work.
In truth, once this ledger was finished, he would be its only reader apart from his wife, Antilla, who occasionally glanced through it. A stray mark or two hardly mattered and would not interfere with checking it later.
But Ruff Dad was something of a perfectionist. He disliked seeing such a glaring flaw in a ledger he had painstakingly prepared.
Besides, although he was the only one who read and used it, the ledger represented a small summary of the year's earnings for his Ruff Merchant Guild. As its president, he found the very process of compiling it deeply satisfying, so he wanted it to be as perfect as possible.
After spending another twenty minutes or so hunched over his desk, Ruff Dad finally recorded the last entry, completing the entire ledger.
He picked up the fairly thin ledger and read it from cover to cover three full times before nodding in satisfaction.
According to its figures, the Ruff Merchant Guild he managed had made total sales of 176,431 gold coins that