"No. Thinking." I went back to the forge and put a bar in the fire and stood watching it come up in color, and I did not see it. "How's your father keeping, Zeke?"
He was quiet a moment. "He don't sleep much," he said. "He goes out nights and sits on the woodpile and looks at the creek. Mama says leave him be."
"And how will you winter? With the cattle gone?"
"I got my wages from you," the boy said. "And Papa's pension, that's eight dollars a month. And we got the nineteen head. Papa says if we sell the hay instead of feeding it, and if Mama takes in washing from the section house, we can hold onto the claim until spring." He went back to cutting rod. "Papa says he'll start over. He says he started over before, from less than nothing, and he can do it again." He took another bite with the hardy. "He says that a lot," he said, after a while, and did not say anything more.
I want to be honest about that night. I did not know at once what I must do. I closed the shop at six and sent Zeke home on his pony with a sack of cornmeal that I said I had too much of, and I went into the house behind the shop that I had built for Angharad, and I sat at her table without lighting the lamp, and I tried to think of a way in which it was not what it was.
I thought, perhaps Prather has done this on his own, without Ballantyne knowing, to make his own name with the company. And that might have been so. But the iron had been ordered on the company's account and the brand registered in the company's name, and Ballantyne himself had told me that morning that he was shipping Double Box cattle on Thursday under his own eye.
I thought, perhaps it is not my business. I am a blacksmith. I make what I am paid to make. If a man buys an axe from me and kills his brother with it, I am not the murderer. It was a true thing as far as it went. But I had not sold Ballantyne an axe. I had sold him a key, cut to fit a lock I had made with my own hands for another man, and he had walked in at the other man's door.