I have never been a speaker, and I do not remember much of what I said. I remember that my voice sounded very small in the wind, and that I held up the two patterns, the brown and the white, one over the other, against the gray sky, the way I had held them in my shop window, so that everyone along that fence could see the ladder inside the box. I remember that I read out of my daybook, July 13th, 1883, Thistle Company, per L. Prather, flaw in right bar, cold shut, customer accepts. I remember that when I said that I had made Abram Hatchett's iron in 1878, with my own hands, and the Double Box iron in July, with the same hands, there was a sound along the fence like wind going through dry grass.
And then I did what I had worked out to do in the night, sitting up with my hammer on the bench.
"I'll tell you before you look," I said, "where it'll be. Left hip, on the right-hand bar of the box, on the inside edge, one finger's width up from the bottom corner. A spot the size of a tack head where the hair didn't burn. It'll be on every Double Box animal in these pens and it won't be on any other brand on this railroad, because there's no other iron in the world that has that hole in it, and I'm the man who put it there." I turned to Fairlie. "Sir, I'd be obliged if you'd pick the animals. Any you like. I don't want it said I chose them."
The little Scotsman looked up at me for a long moment with his sharp face. Then he looked at Ballantyne. Ballantyne did not move. Then Fairlie stepped up to the fence and looked over it into the press of cattle, and pointed with his notebook. "That one," he said, in a clipped Dundee voice. "The red with the white face. And that black one there, at the back. And—" he hesitated, and pointed again— "the brindled beast with the broken horn."
Henning did not want to do it. I watched him sit his horse and look at the pen and look at Ballantyne, and I could see him thinking that there were thirty of them and one deputy, and that Prather was gone and somebody had to say what the Thistle did. And then Ballantyne said, very quietly, without raising his voice at all, "Rope them, Rufus," and Henning shook out his loop.
They roped the three of them one after another, heeled and stretched them out on the frozen muck of the alley with a rider at each end, the way you would for a branding, and Dyce got down off the fence and knelt in the dirt at the hip of the first one, the red white-face, with his buffalo coat spread out behind him. I gave him the shears. He clipped the hair off the brand, close, all over, in that bitter wind, and then he smeared lard on the scar with his fingers to make it stand out, and bent down close, and looked.
He did not say anything. He moved over and made room, and Fairlie bent down beside him in his tweed ulster, and then Corliss, and then Abram.