I thought about it. I owe it to the truth to say that I thought about it, standing there with my hands open by the forge, because it was a decent offer by the light of most of the world, and he was a decent man asking it, and I loved him in the way that men who have stood together in ashes do love each other, without saying it.
"Did Prather tell you I put my mark on the iron?" I said.
He looked at me a moment. "He told me."
"Then you knew in July that it would come back to me if it came back to anybody. You knew whose name was on it." I shook my head. "I'm not angry about that, Alasdair. I'd have done the same, maybe, in your place, gone to the man I trusted most. But I made Abram Hatchett's iron too. I put my mark on that one because he asked me to. He said a thing made right ought to say who made it." I looked at the board on the wall. "I can't make it right in the spring. I can only make it right tomorrow, or not at all."
He stood there a long while. Then he nodded once, the way a man nods at a hand of cards that has gone against him, and turned toward the door, and with his hand on the latch he stopped.
"Prather is not a patient man," he said, without turning round. "I have told him to leave you be. I would keep my doors barred tonight, all the same." And he went out, and I heard Lochiel's shoes go away down Front Street, slow, a long time fading.
I barred the doors and sat up with my heaviest hammer on the bench, feeling foolish, and nobody came. At about three in the morning I heard a horse go by fast on the north road, toward the Sybille, and did not think anything of it.