"He'll stand with Ballantyne," I said.
"Maybe," Abram said. "Maybe not. I've known some inspectors. Most of 'em are cattle buyers who went broke. They don't love the big men as much as the big men think they do." He got up from the table and went to a trunk in the corner of the room and opened it, and took out a folded blue paper, very worn at the creases, and a sergeant's coat with yellow chevrons on the sleeves, and laid them on the bed. "I'll go in with you," he said. "Lettie, I'll want my good shirt."
We rode back to Halfmoon together in the afternoon, and we did not talk much. Once, a few miles out, Abram said, without looking at me, "You make that iron again tomorrow, you think you could? Same flaw?" And I said no, I did not think any smith alive could make a cold shut come out in the same place twice, it would be like trying to drop a coin and have it land on the same knot in a floorboard. And he nodded, and did not say anything more for another five miles.
Linus Gilmore read the complaint three times with his spectacles on and three times with them off, and then he sighed like a man setting down a heavy sack, and signed it. Hosea Corliss, the deputy, was a long, slow, red-faced young man from Iowa who had been a deputy for eight months, and when he read the warrant he went a deeper red and said, "Mr. Ballantyne? The Thistle Ballantyne?" and Abram said, "That's correct, Deputy," in his sergeant's voice, and Corliss looked at the yellow chevrons on Abram's coat and said, "Yes, sir," without seeming to know that he had said it.
The inspector was a man named Willis Dyce. Abram had been right about him; he had been a cattle buyer at Ellsworth in Kansas in the old days and had lost his money when the trail moved west, and now he worked for the Association at a hundred dollars a month and expenses. He was a heavy, bald man in a buffalo coat, with small, shrewd, tired eyes, and he received us in the hotel parlor with a glass of whiskey at his elbow, and he heard us out without interrupting. When I had shown him the patterns and the daybook he sat a long time turning the brown paper over in his thick fingers.
"I'll tell you how this looks from where I sit, Mr. Vaughan," he said at last. "You're a smith. You make irons for half the outfits in this end of the territory. Any one of them could have a flaw in it. You've got two pieces of paper that fit together, which I grant you is a curious thing, and you've got a little hole in a bar. Mr. Ballantyne sits on the executive committee of the Association that pays my wages. He has a man here from Scotland, from the board of his company, who is going to stand on the platform tomorrow and watch those cattle loaded. If I hold that shipment on the word of a blacksmith and a, a"—he looked at Abram—"a homesteader, and I am wrong, I will be selling buttons in Kansas City by Christmas."
"And if you load them and you're wrong," Abram said, "you'll be the inspector that passed a hundred and forty stolen head under his own nose for a member, with a deputy sheriff and a warrant standing right there watching. And it will be in the Cheyenne papers. I'll see that it is."