"He holds your paper. Zeke told us. On your shop."
"He does."
She looked at me a long moment, and then she set the coffee pot down on the stove and came and poured my cup full, and Abram's, and her own, and sat down at the table with us, which she had not done before. "Then we'd best think what to do," she said, "and not waste any more of the day being sorry about it. There'll be time for sorry after."
It was Lettie who saw the way through, in the end, though Abram was the one who walked it.
The Association would not hear a complaint from a man who was not a member. That was settled. But the Association was not the law of Wyoming Territory, whatever it liked to think, and the law of Wyoming Territory said that any citizen might swear out a complaint of grand larceny before a justice of the peace, and the justice might issue a warrant, and a sheriff or his deputy might hold the property in question until there was an examination. There was a justice of the peace in Halfmoon. He was a man named Linus Gilmore who kept the general store and sold Lettie her soap and her bluing, and he was not a brave man, but he was a careful one, and he read the territorial statutes in the evenings for pleasure, and Lettie said he would not refuse a properly sworn paper from a man who had always paid cash. And there was a deputy sheriff of Albany County living at the hotel that week, because the railroad had asked for one to be at the pens while the shipping went on, there having been a knifing in one of the saloons in September. His name was Hosea Corliss.
"And there's the inspector," Abram said. "There's always an inspector at the pens when they ship."
That was so. The Association kept brand inspectors at every shipping point on the railroad during the season, and at the stockyards in Omaha and Chicago too, to look over every animal that went into a car and make certain the brands on it belonged to the man who was shipping it. It was the proudest thing the Association did. They printed it in their reports. It was meant to stop men stealing from the Association's members.