"Zeke's fine. Zeke's minding my shop." I stood holding Nebo's reins. I found I did not know what to do with my hands. "I need to talk to you, Abram. To you and Mrs. Hatchett both, if she'll have me."
Lettie had come to the door of the house by then, drying her hands on her apron. She was a small woman, very straight like her husband, with gray hair wrapped up in a blue cloth, and a face that had been pretty once and was now something better than pretty, which was strong. She looked at me and at Abram, and then she said, "Come in, Mr. Vaughan. Come in out of the wind. I've got coffee on." And I went in.
I laid the two patterns down on the oilcloth side by side, the Lazy H on the white invoice paper and the Double Box on the brown flour sack. I opened the daybook to July and turned it around so they could read it. And then I put the brown paper on top of the white and held them together up to the little window, the way I had held them in my shop, and I let them see it.
Abram did not say anything. He looked at the two papers in the window for a long time. Then he reached out his big scarred hand, very slowly, and took them from me, and held them up himself, and moved the top one a little, a sixteenth of an inch, and then moved it back. Lettie stood behind him with the coffee pot in her hand, and did not pour.
"I made it," I said. "The Double Box. I made it in July for Lon Prather on the Thistle account. I didn't look at it. I never put it against yours. I never thought to. I was in a hurry and he paid me two dollars extra, and I made it out of a piece of old tire, and there was a flaw in the face of it, a little pit, and Prather said it would do." I told them about the pit. I told them about the pens that morning and the red tuft on the brindle steer. I told them about Ballantyne and the man from Dundee and the cars that would come on Thursday. I told them the whole of it, and I did not leave out the two dollars.
When I had done there was no sound in that kitchen but the wind in the stovepipe and the washing snapping on the line outside.
"Thursday," Abram said at last.