The Price of Progress Part 2

No one reached for the ledger.

For several long, suffocating seconds, the only sound inside the conference room was the steady, mechanical tick-tock of the tall mahogany grandfather clock standing near the stone hearth.

Arthur was the first to break the heavy silence.

"I've checked it four separate times," he said softly. He removed his wire-rimmed spectacles and rubbed the red marks on the bridge of his nose before looking up at Ernest. "I even scrapped my original scratch paper and started over from the very beginning." He offered a faint, exhausted smile that didn't reach his eyes. "I was desperately hoping I'd misplaced a decimal point or misread a row of zeroes."

Ernest slowly reached across the mahogany table and pulled the thick leather ledger toward himself.

His eyes moved deliberately down the columns of crisp ink figures, reading the cold reality of their ambition line by line:

Land Acquisition & Crown Titles.