Dyce looked at him. "You'd do that, would you, Sergeant?"
"I've done harder things."
The inspector drank off his whiskey. "Hide test," he said, after a while, to nobody in particular. "That's the only thing that'll stand up. You can argue about a hair brand till Judgment. Kill one, skin it, turn it over. If the old brand's under there, it's under there, and no lawyer in Cheyenne can talk it away." He looked at me. "But that's a forty-dollar steer, and the company'll want paying for it if there's nothing to find. Who's paying?"
"I am," I said.
He looked at me a while longer. Then he nodded. "Seven o'clock," he said. "At the pens. Before the cars are spotted. I'll speak to Mr. Ballantyne myself tonight; I'll not have him walk into it blind. Deputy, you'll have that warrant in your pocket and you'll keep it there unless I ask for it, and you'll keep your hand off your pistol, if you please, because there will be thirty Thistle riders at those pens and I don't care to be shot over a cow."
I went home after that. Abram took a room at the boarding house by the section house, the only place in Halfmoon that would let one to him, and Zeke went to stay with his father, and I was alone in my shop with the fires banked and the patterns back on the board and the daybook on the bench, and the wind going round and round the stone walls like something looking for a way in.
Ballantyne came at about ten o'clock.