And then I thought about the note.
It was in the safe at the Thistle headquarters, thirty miles up the Sybille. Two thousand one hundred dollars, at six per cent, for the stone and the anvil and the new tools, payable on demand. I had paid down six hundred and forty of it in two years. If it were called, I could not pay it. Nobody in Halfmoon could have paid it, outside of Ballantyne himself and perhaps the railroad. The shop would go, and the house, and the anvil, and the board with a hundred and twenty brands on it, and I would be forty-nine years old with my two hands and a box of tools, which is how I had started in life, but it is one thing to start that way at twenty and another to start that way at fifty.
And underneath that, worse than that, I thought about his face in the snow that morning in the ashes, and his hand on my shoulder, and his voice saying, You'll build in stone this time, Emlyn. I thought about the Welsh poets. I thought about him holding Lochiel's foot.
I lit the lamp at last, about midnight, and got down my daybook from the shelf and turned back to July. There it was, in my own hand, in the column where I put such things: July 13th, 1883. Thistle Co., per L. Prather. Stamp iron, Double Box, 4½ x 3, ⅜ face, from old tire. Flaw in R. bar, cold shut, customer accepts. Maker's mark struck. Rush, $2.00 extra. Paid. I sat and looked at it until the words stopped making any sense, the way a word will if you say it over and over, and then I closed the book and blew out the lamp and lay down on the bed in my clothes, and I did not sleep at all.
At first light on Wednesday I went down to the shipping pens.
They lay along the railroad siding on the east side of town, a quarter mile of heavy plank corrals and alleys and loading chutes, weathered silver and splashed to the height of a man's waist with the green muck of ten years of frightened cattle. The Thistle herd had been held on the flats across the creek for two days, waiting on the cars, and the riders had begun bringing them in before dawn. When I got there the sun was just up over the rim of the plains, red as a forge, and the dust was hanging over the pens in a long gold cloud, and the noise was the noise of eight hundred head of cattle who had never been penned before and did not care for it, a bawling and a clatter of horns on plank and a deep groaning under it, like a ship working in a sea.
I had a reason to be there, if anyone asked. The railroad paid me to keep the iron on the chute gates in repair, and the hinge on the third gate had been cracked since August. I took my hammer and a sack of rivets and went along the outside fence of the pens like a man looking for his hinge.