"He's thrown the near fore again," he said, when he had tied the bay to the ring outside the big door. "On the rocks above the Sybille crossing. I found it in the road and brought it to you as a reproach." He held up the old shoe, worn thin at the toe, with two nails still in it bent like fishhooks.
"It's a reproach to whoever let him go a month past his time," I said.
"That would be me." He smiled. He had a broad, weathered face with gray coming in at the sides of his beard and eyes as pale as the winter sky over the plains. "I have been in Cheyenne at the Association meetings and in the saddle between, and I have not been looking after my horse. Or my house. Or my own two feet, if it comes to that. Good morning, Zeke."
"Morning, Mr. Ballantyne," Zeke said, from the second forge where he was cutting nail rod. He said it politely and without looking up, and I remember that, because I had not yet thought about it, and later I thought about little else.
I want to tell this fairly. In the newspaper accounts that came after, Alasdair Ballantyne is a cattle baron of the old robber stamp, a man in a silk hat with a whip and a lean dog, and that is not who stood in my shop with his horse's foot in his hands. I had known him eleven years. He had come out from Scotland in 1872 as a young man with a little money of his own and a great deal of other people's, and he had built the Thistle outfit from nothing, from a dugout on the Sybille and four hundred head of Texas cattle so wild they had to be roped to be counted. He had buried a wife in that country, the same as I had. He had wintered through the great blizzard of the spring of '81, when the cattle drifted against the railroad fences and died standing up, and I had seen him ride into Halfmoon that April with his face burned black from the snow-glare, and sit on the steps of the section house, and weep, not for the money but for the beasts. He read books. He had lent me a volume of the Welsh poets once, in English translation, because he said a man ought not to lose his own country entirely, and I had read it at night after Angharad died and found that it helped some.
And when my first shop burned, in the January of 1882, three weeks after I buried her, and I stood in the snow in my nightshirt and watched thirty-five years of tools go into a heap of red, it was Alasdair Ballantyne who came the next morning and walked through the ashes with me and kicked at the black lumps that had been my tongs and my swages, and said, "You'll build in stone this time, Emlyn," as though it were simply decided. He put up the money for the stone. He sent to Philadelphia for the anvil. He drew up a note at six per cent, which was half what the bank in Laramie would have asked of me if they would have asked anything at all, and he put it in the safe at the Thistle headquarters, and he never once mentioned it afterward except to ask, each first of the month when I rode out to pay on it, whether I had been sleeping.
So I held his horse's near fore between my knees that morning and pulled the clinches on the other three while I was at it, because Lochiel was a month past his time all around, and I was glad to see the man.
"You're shipping, I hear," I said.