Fairlie looked at the three animals stretched out in the dirt. He looked at Ballantyne a long time, and something passed between them that I could not read and did not try to. Then he said, "The brindled one," and stepped back from the fence, and put his notebook in his pocket.
Corliss shot it. He did it cleanly, behind the ear, with his revolver, and the big brindle steer shuddered once and was still, and the crowd along the fence made a noise and the women drew back and the boys pushed forward. Then two of the Basques, who had skinned more sheep than any men in the territory and did not care whose cattle these were, came over the fence with their knives at a nod from Dyce and took the hide off that steer's left side in about the time it takes to tell it, quick and neat, peeling it back in a great sheet. They threw it over the top rail of the fence with the hair side away from us and the flesh side out, wet and pale and steaming in the cold.
Everyone came to look. I have seen men come up to a coffin that way, slowly, with their hats in their hands.
On the inside of a hide, a brand does not show the way it shows outside. There is no hair, no color, only the pale, faintly blue skin, and in it the scar of the iron as a raised welt, darker than the rest, a kind of map of the burn drawn in the hide itself. And a brand that has been burned twice, at two different times, shows that too, because the old burn has healed and thickened into true scar, gristly and gray, and the new one is still fresh and soft and dark, and you can no more mistake the one for the other than you could mistake an old man's hand for a boy's.
There on the fence rail, in the gray light, was the Lazy H.
It was larger than the box. That was the thing I had not thought of, and that struck me hardest of all, standing there. Abram had burned his brand on that steer when it was a calf three summers before, four and a half inches across, and the steer had grown and the brand had grown with it, the way brands do, spreading on the hide as a picture spreads on a balloon that is blown up, so that now the old bars of the Lazy H were near six inches long, thick gray ridges of old scar. And laid over the top of them, cruder, fresher, darker, was the Double Box at four and a half, its new sides sitting inside the ends of the old bars, so that the old ladder stuck out past the box at both ends by nearly an inch, plain as print. On the hair side, Prather's men must have smeared the corners with a hot iron to hide it, a blotted look that I had taken in the pens for heavy branding. On the flesh side there was nothing to hide behind. The old rung ran up the middle, gray and spread, with the fresh line of the center bar burned on top of it a little off true, a quarter inch to one side. And in the new right-hand line, soft and dark, a finger's width up from the bottom corner, there was a little round island of clean, pale skin.
Nobody said anything for a long time. The wind blew. Out on the main line the engine let go a long breath of steam.