Then Fairlie, the little man from Dundee, took off his round hat, I do not know why, and stood there with it in his hand.
Ballantyne came forward then. He walked up to the fence rail where the hide hung, and stood in front of it, and looked at it for a long time with his hands at his sides, the way he had looked at the dead cattle against the drift fences in the April of '81. Then he put out one hand and touched it, very lightly, with two fingers, on the gray scar of the old rung. Then he turned around.
"Mr. Dyce," he said, in a perfectly level voice, "the Double Box cattle will not be loaded. You may tell the railroad that the company releases twelve of its cars. The cattle in those pens belong to Mr. Hatchett, and I would ask that they be held under the deputy's charge until he can take them home." He turned to Abram, and for a moment I thought he would say something more, and his face worked, and he did not. He only bowed to him, a short, stiff, old-country bow from the waist, which I had never in eleven years seen him give to any man. Abram looked at him without any expression at all and did not bow back.
"Mr. Fairlie," Ballantyne said then, "you will have my resignation as manager in writing this afternoon, and a true account of the company's herd, as near as I can make it, before you sail. I am afraid it will make poor reading in Dundee." He turned to Corliss. "Deputy, I believe you have a paper for me. I should be obliged if you would serve it here rather than at the hotel. I should not like to keep Mr. Hatchett waiting any longer than he has been kept already."
Corliss went very red, and took the warrant out of his pocket, and served it.
And Abram Hatchett climbed over the fence of the first Double Box pen, in his sergeant's coat, and dropped down among his cattle, and walked into the middle of them slowly with his hand held out low, talking to them. I could not hear what he said. The big steers swung their heads to look at him and shifted and blew, and some of them backed off, and then one of them, a rangy red four-year-old with a white splash on its face, put out its nose and smelled his hand, and did not move away. Zeke went over the fence after his father. And I stood by the hide on the fence rail with the daybook still open in my hands, and found that I could not see the page to close it.
That is most of what there is to tell, though not all of it.