"The court will want it," I said.
"Yes. That is why I brought it to you, and not to Corliss. You made it. You will know if anyone has been at it." He put on his hat. Then, at the door, as he had done before, he stopped with his hand on the latch. "May I ask you something, Emlyn? If you had known, in July. If Prather had laid that paper on your bench and told you plainly what it was for. Would you have made it?"
I thought about that. I owed him the thinking.
"No," I said. "But I didn't have to know. I only had to ask who it was for and what it would go on, and put it up against the board, the way I'd do for any other brand that came in new. I've done it a hundred times. I didn't do it that once because the man asking was you, and the money was rush money, and I trusted you." I set the iron down on the bench. "So it's my work. All of it. Not only the hole."
He nodded slowly, and went out into the snow, and I did not see him again. The trial is set for April. Willis Dyce has told me privately that no jury of stockmen in Albany County has convicted a member of the Association of anything since the Association was formed, and that he does not expect this one to be the first, and that he hopes he is wrong. The Cheyenne Leader has said that Ballantyne is a ruined man whatever the jury does. Abram Hatchett's membership in the Association is to be voted on at the spring meeting, and Abram says that he will believe it when he sees it, and in the meantime he is buying a bull.
The iron hangs on my board now, on two nails, under the brown flour-sack pattern and beside the Lazy H, with a paper tag tied to the ring that says, in my own hand, Exhibit, Territory v. Ballantyne, Do Not Touch. Zeke dusts round it carefully when he sweeps. I do not know what I will owe the bank in April, or what twelve stockmen in Laramie City will say, or whether I will be shoeing horses in this shop next winter or in some other man's. I know that the iron will tell the truth to anyone who knows how to read it, because that is what iron does, and I know that I am the man who made it say what it says.
In the mornings now Zeke comes in out of the cold with snow on his shoulders and lights the forges, and we work. He swings the sledge and I point with the hammer, and the sparks go up, and the old iron goes red and then yellow and then white under the coal, and gives up its shadows, and we strike it there.