It was there. It was there on the red, and on the black, and on the brindle with the broken horn, and Dyce clipped each of them himself and called it out in his flat voice for the people on the fence, one, two, three. A round spot on the inside of the right bar, one finger's width up from the corner, where the hide was clean and smooth and pale under the lard, in the middle of the dark scar, like a seed. Fairlie measured it against his own gloved finger. He wrote in his notebook.
"Now the Thistle iron," I said. "If you would, Mr. Dyce."
Henning's riders roped a Thistle steer out of the beef pens, and Dyce clipped him, and there was no spot on him anywhere, only the fat burned bulb and the crown, clean and old and even. The Thistle iron had been made by a smith in Cheyenne in 1874, and it was a good iron, better than mine, and had no hole in it.
"That shows the iron," Henning said. He said it loudly, so that the fence could hear. "It don't show anything else. So the smith made a bad iron with a hole in it, and the company used it on the Double Box cattle. That's all that shows. Them was Oregon yearlings, bought and paid for."
"Those are not yearlings," Abram Hatchett said. He did not say it loudly. He did not need to. "There are four-year-old steers in this pen. I can show you which. I can tell you what I named the half of them."
"You can say anything you want," Henning said. "Hair grows."
"Yes," said Dyce, standing up and dusting off his knees. "Hair grows. That is why we will look under it." He turned to Fairlie. "Sir. Choose one more, please. The company will be paid for it by Mr. Vaughan, at market, if I am wrong."