He was quiet again. Then he said, "May I sit down, Emlyn?" and I gave him the stool by the bench, and he sat on it with his hat on his knee, in his good gray coat, under the board with the hundred and twenty brands on it, and he looked up at them a long time.
"Do you know how many cattle the Laramie and Sybille Company has on its books?" he said. "Fourteen thousand two hundred. I sent that number to Dundee in June. Do you know how many it has on the grass? I do not know, exactly. Nobody knows, exactly. I believe it is somewhere between eight and nine thousand. I bought the Rawhide herd from Bascom in seventy-nine on a book count, and Bascom lied to me, as I have since learned that he lied to everybody. And then there was the winter of eighty and eighty-one. You remember that winter."
"I remember."
"I lost three thousand head that spring. I put down six hundred in the books. I told myself I would make it up with the calf crop. I told myself the board would not understand the truth and would sell out at the bottom and ruin everybody, the hands, the shareholders, the whole country. I told myself a great many things." He turned his hat around on his knee. "Do you know who the shareholders of the Laramie and Sybille Company are, Emlyn? They are not lords. They are jute-mill managers in Dundee, and ministers' widows, and schoolmasters, and a retired sea captain who wrote to me last Christmas to say that his dividend paid for his daughter's wedding. Two hundred and eleven of them. I have their names in a book at the ranch. And they have sent Mr. Fairlie to count their cattle, and when he counts them he will find five thousand head that are not there, and their shares will be worth nothing, and I will be the man who did it to them." He was silent a little. "I thought, if I could show him a new range, with a new herd on it, and ship a good bunch off it this fall, he would go home content. And by spring I could find another way. I thought a hundred and forty head would not be missed. A homesteader, not in the Association, on a creek nobody wanted. He would start over. They always do."
"He's starting over," I said. "His wife is taking in the section crew's washing."
Ballantyne closed his eyes.
When he opened them he looked at me directly, and his eyes in the forge light were very pale and very tired. "I will not threaten you with the paper, Emlyn," he said. "I want you to know that I came here meaning to. I rode the whole way from the hotel meaning to. I had the words ready. And I find that I cannot, because if I did it I should have to think less of myself than I already do, and I am not certain there is room." He stood up and put his hat on. "But I will ask you. Not threaten. Ask. Let the cars go tomorrow. I will make it right with Hatchett in the spring, quietly. I will pay him for every head, at market, and more. You have my word on that, and you have known me eleven years and you know what my word has been worth."