The Thistle beeves were in the big pens nearest the chutes, great rangy four- and five-year-old steers with horns as wide as a man's arms could reach, branded with the thistle on the left ribs, a fat burned bulb with a crown on top of it. The Double Box cattle were in three smaller pens farther back. I knew them before I could see the brands, because they were not what Prather had said they were. They were not a bunch of Oregon yearlings bought in the spring. They were every kind of animal: two-year-old steers and three-year-old steers and some heavy four-year-olds that would have dressed out at a thousand pounds, and young heifers among them that had no business being shipped to market at all, that any honest rancher would have kept back for breeding. They were Abram Hatchett's whole increase for five years, all ages, in a heap.
I climbed the fence of the nearest pen and sat on the top rail and looked.
The brand was on the left hip, high up, where Abram had always put his. It had been burned in summer, two or three months before, and the hair had grown back over most of it, so that from any distance the Double Box showed only as a dark rectangle with a line down the middle, the hair standing up stiff and a little paler along the old burns. But a brand that has been burned twice in the same place never grows back quite like one burned once. Along the top and the bottom and down the middle of every brand, the lines were wider and harder and more scarred, and the hair over them grew thin and curly, the way it grows on old scar. The two ends of the box, left and right, were narrow and clean and new. You had to know to look. I knew.
And then a steer turned broadside to me in the press of the pen, a big brindle three-year-old with one horn broken off short, and the low sun came across his hip, and there it was. A finger's width up from the bottom right corner of the box, on the inside of the right-hand line, a little round tuft of red hair, standing straight up out of the scar like a single bristle on a scrubbed hearth. It was so small that if you had not been told it was there you would have taken it for a burr. I looked at the next animal, and the next. I must have looked at a hundred brands in the next half hour, and on every one where the light fell right I found it. The same place. The same size. The same little red seed in the slice of bread.
I had made a thing in July and here it was in October, stamped two hundred times on the living hides of another man's cattle, and every one of them said my name.
"Vaughan."
Lon Prather was sitting his horse in the alley behind me. I do not know how long he had been there. He had a coiled rope on his saddle horn and his hat pulled low against the sun, and his face under it was still and pleasant and gave away nothing.