Abram Hatchett took a hundred and thirty-eight head home to Little Sand Creek on the Saturday, with Zeke and two of the Basques riding swing for him and the whole town out on Front Street to watch them go by. Six had been lost somewhere between the Lazy H range and the shipping pens, and nobody ever said where. The brindle steer with the broken horn was butchered and divided, and Lettie Hatchett sent a quarter of it to my door with a note that said only, For the smith, from the owner. I have the note still.
Lon Prather was never found. A man who came through from the Black Hills said he had seen him dealing faro in Deadwood, and that is all anybody knows. It was Prather's horse I had heard going north at three in the morning, toward the Thistle headquarters on the Sybille, and I learned later why.
Alasdair Ballantyne was bound over by Justice Linus Gilmore, in the back room of the general store among the flour barrels, for trial at the spring term of the district court in Laramie City, on a charge of grand larceny of cattle. His bail was set at five thousand dollars, and he paid it himself in gold, and went out to the ranch, and spent three weeks with Mr. Fairlie and the tally books. I do not know what they found. The company sent out a new manager from Edinburgh in November, a young man with a waxed mustache who wore a pistol to church, and the first thing he did was write to all the people who owed the company money. My note was sold to the First National Bank of Cheyenne. They wrote me a very civil letter. The balance, fourteen hundred and sixty dollars, is due on the first day of April.
The Thistle trade stopped, of course, and some of the other big outfits found that they could get their shoeing done in Laramie as well as in Halfmoon, and I do not blame them; a smith who will stand on a fence and talk about one man's brands will talk about another's. But the Basques still come, and the section crew, and the freighters, and the small men from the creeks north of the railroad, more of them than before. Some of them come for the work. Some of them come, I think, to look at the board. They stand in front of it a while with their hats on, not saying anything, and then they go out.
Ballantyne came to the shop one last time in the middle of November, the week before he went to Cheyenne to wait out the winter near his lawyers. It was evening, and snowing, the first real snow of that year, big soft flakes coming down slow past the window, and I heard Lochiel's shoes in it, muffled, and knew them.
He had a gunny sack under his arm. He laid it on my bench and folded it back, and there was the Double Box iron, black and scaled from the fire, with thirty inches of half-inch handle and a ring at the end. I picked it up. I turned the face to the lamp and found the pit with my thumb, and ran my thumb up the handle to the ring, and found my little anvil and the E V beneath it, worn half smooth by Prather's gloves.
"It was in my safe," Ballantyne said. "Beside your note. I took it off the calf wagon myself the last week of August, when the work was done. Prather wanted it thrown in the river, and I told him I would see to it, and I put it in the safe and turned the key." He looked at the iron in my hands. "He rode out the night before the hearing to get it, I think. He found he could not open the safe, and then I suppose he understood that I had not wanted it opened, and he went on north." He was quiet a moment. "I have asked myself a good many times why I did not throw it in the river. The best answer I have is that it had your mark on it, and I could not do it. Make of that what you like."