Thursday came up gray and bitter, with a wind out of the northwest that had snow in the smell of it and a skim of ice on the slack tub when I broke it with my fist to wash my face. I put on my good coat over my leather apron, because I did not know what else a man wore to such a thing, and I put the daybook and the two patterns inside the coat, and a pair of sheep shears and a tin of lard in the pocket, and at half past six I walked down Front Street to the pens.
Half of Halfmoon was there before me. I do not know how word had gone round, but it had, the way word does in a town of three hundred souls with two saloons, and they were standing along the outside fences in their coats and shawls with their breath going up in the wind: section hands and their wives, storekeepers, the Basque sheepmen with their dogs, the Methodist minister, and a great many boys who should have been in school. Out on the main line beyond the siding the eastbound stock train was standing with its forty empty cars, the engine breathing steam in long white sighs, and the brakemen sitting on the car roofs to watch. And along the alleys inside the pens were the Thistle riders, thirty of them perhaps, sitting their horses in a loose bunch with their collars turned up, very quiet.
Lon Prather was not among them. I looked for him particularly. His second, a big fair Minnesotan called Rufus Henning, was sitting the horse at the head of the bunch where Prather ought to have been, and when I asked Deputy Corliss about it, he only shook his head and said nobody had seen the Thistle foreman since the night before.
Abram was standing by the gate of the first Double Box pen in his sergeant's coat with the yellow chevrons, very straight, with Zeke beside him. Willis Dyce was there in his buffalo coat with a ledger under his arm. Beside him was a small, neat, sharp-faced man of fifty in a tweed ulster and a round hat, holding a notebook in gloved hands, whom I knew must be Mr. Lennox Fairlie of Dundee, and on Fairlie's other side, bareheaded in the wind with his gray hair blowing, stood Alasdair Ballantyne.
He looked at me once as I came up, and nodded, and looked away.
Dyce did not waste time. He climbed up three rails on the fence of the Double Box pen so that he stood above us all, and he called the thing to order in a big flat Kansas voice that carried over the bawling of the cattle, and he said what it was: that a complaint had been sworn before the justice of the peace by Abram Hatchett, of Little Sand Creek, stock raiser, alleging that certain cattle offered for shipment that morning in the Double Box brand by the Laramie and Sybille Cattle Company had been taken from his range and the brand altered from his own registered Lazy H; that the Association's inspector was obliged to satisfy himself as to the ownership of all brands before loading; and that he intended to satisfy himself here and now, before witnesses, and that any man who interfered would answer for it to the deputy sheriff and to the Association both. "Mr. Vaughan," he said, "you'll tell these people what you told me."
So I climbed up on the fence beside him, and I told them.