"What's your meaning, Lon?"
"Meaning?" He smiled, a small, polite, Texas smile. "Ain't got no meaning. Just passin' the time of day. You go on and fix your hinge, Mr. Vaughan. Cars'll be here tomorrow mornin' and these cattle'll be in Omaha by Sunday and in tins by the end of the month, and it's a long, cold winter comin', and a man's best off keepin' his own fire lit." He touched his hat brim and turned his horse and rode away up the alley at a walk, and he did not look back.
I fixed the hinge on the third gate. I do not remember doing it. Then I went back up Front Street and saddled my mule, Nebo, who was eighteen years old and had come out from Pennsylvania with Angharad and objected to everything on principle, and I told Zeke I had to go out to the Basque camp about the axles and he was to mind the shop and touch nothing in the fires, and I rode north toward Little Sand Creek.
It was eighteen miles, the country lifting as you went north from the railroad in long brown swells toward the dark line of the Laramie Mountains, with the antelope standing on the ridges to watch you go by, white rumps flashing when they ran. I rode it with the daybook in one saddlebag and the two patterns folded in the other, and I tried out in my head the words I would say, and none of them were any good.
The Hatchett place sat in a bend of the creek under a cutbank, a long, low log house with a sod roof and a stone chimney, a log barn, a pole corral, and a haystack the size of a church fenced off from the stock. There was smoke coming out of the chimney and washing on a line, a great deal of washing, sheets and shirts and long red underdrawers snapping in the wind, and I knew whose it was. It was the section crew's washing from Halfmoon. Lettie Hatchett had started taking it in.
Abram was splitting cedar posts by the barn. He saw me coming a long way off, and he stopped and leaned on his maul and watched me ride in, and when I got down off Nebo he did not come forward to meet me, only stood where he was.
"Mr. Vaughan," he said. "Is it Zeke?"