It was. I fitted it hot and the smoke came up off the hoof wall with that smell like burning hair and old candles that I have smelled every day of my life since I was twelve, and Lochiel stood for it like a gentleman, and Mr. Ballantyne talked to him in the Gaelic, low, which he did when he thought no one was listening closely. I drove the nails and wrung off the points and rasped the clinches down. When it was done he paid me in silver, as he always did, and asked whether I had been sleeping, as he always did, and then he swung up on the bay and rode off down Front Street toward the hotel, where I suppose he had arranged to meet the man from Dundee.
It was only after he had gone that it came back to me what he had said. The Double Box.
I stood there in the doorway of the shop with the rasp still in my hand and the wind coming down Front Street off the plains, carrying grit and the smell of the shipping pens, and I thought about July.
"Mr. Vaughan?" Zeke said behind me. "You want me to keep on with the rod?"
"Keep on," I said. "I'll be a minute."
Now I ought to say something here about Zeke Hatchett and his people, because I had had them in my mind all that autumn without ever setting them alongside the other thing, the way a man may carry two coins in two pockets for a month and never think to put them in one hand and see they are the same weight.
Abram Hatchett had been a sergeant in the Ninth Cavalry. He had been born a slave in Kentucky and had joined the Army in 1866, the year they first raised the colored regiments for the frontier, and he had served twelve years in Texas and New Mexico, and taken a Mescalero bullet through the shoulder in the Sacramento Mountains, and had come out of it with his discharge papers and his sergeant's stripes and a bad shoulder and a wife named Lettie who had been a laundress at Fort Stanton. They had come up to Wyoming in 1878 because Abram said he had seen all of the desert a man needed to see in one life, and they had taken up a homestead and a pre-emption claim on Little Sand Creek, eighteen miles north of Halfmoon, and they had begun to run cattle. By the summer of 1883 they had something above a hundred and sixty head, branded with a Lazy H, which is to say an H lying down on its side, so that it looks like a short ladder with one rung, or the letter I with very wide feet at the top and bottom. The brand was registered in Abram's name with the county clerk in Laramie, properly and legally. It was not registered with the Wyoming Stock Growers Association, because the Association did not want him.
They had not said that in so many words, of course. They had said that membership required the endorsement of two members in good standing and a vote of the executive committee, and that small owners were welcome to apply, and then when Abram applied they had not voted on it. They had not voted on it at the spring meeting of 1882 or the autumn meeting of 1882 or the spring meeting of 1883.