Prather was the Thistle foreman. He was a Texan, from somewhere down on the Brazos, a narrow, quiet, sandy man of perhaps forty with a sun-cracked face and very good manners, who had come up the trail with one of the first herds in '72 and stayed with Ballantyne ever since. I had never had any particular trouble with him. He paid his bills, or the Thistle paid them through him, and he did not drink in my shop or spit on my floor, which put him above most of the riders who came through. He had a way of standing very still and looking at a thing a long time before he spoke about it, the way a cat looks at a hole.
"Need an iron made," he said. "Brandin' iron. Stamp iron, not a runnin' iron. Boss wants it by Saturday."
"What brand?"
He took a folded paper out of his vest pocket and opened it on my bench and smoothed it flat with the side of his hand. It was a piece of heavy brown wrapping paper, the kind the store in Halfmoon used for flour, and on it someone had drawn a brand in pencil, carefully, with a ruler, and gone over the lines with ink. It was a rectangle a little wider than it was tall, divided down the middle by a single upright line, so that it made two boxes side by side, like a window sash with two panes. Along the edges were measurements, written in a neat, small hand: four and one half inches across, three inches high, the bars three-eighths face.
"Double Box," Prather said. "New brand. Boss has registered it for the company's new range up on the Halfmoon headwaters. Bought a bunch of yearlin's out of Oregon this spring, gonna run 'em separate from the Thistle stuff, and he wants 'em branded different so's the books stay clean."
I looked at it. It was a very simple brand, as brands go. I had made dozens harder. "Saturday's quick," I said. "I've got the Basques' axles and I'm out of good bar. I've got nothing in three-eighths square but some old tire."
"Tire'll do." He put a silver dollar on the paper, and then another one on top of it. "Rush," he said. "Boss knows it's a rush."
So I made it out of tire. I want to be exact about this, because everything came to hang on it. I had a length of old wagon tire in the rack, off a Studebaker freight wagon that had been wrecked in the Laramie River crossing the year before, good Swedish iron, five-eighths wide and three-eighths thick, worn bright on one side from the road. I cut four pieces from it on the hardy, and drew them down to three-eighths square under the hammer, and bent and scarfed them, and welded them up into a rectangle on the horn of the anvil, and then forge-welded the center bar across. A stamp iron of that kind is made all of one piece, with the face of the brand at the bottom and a long handle rising from the middle of it, so that a man can heat it in the fire and lay it on the hide of a roped calf all at once, the whole brand in one press, rather than drawing it line by line as you would with a running iron. I put a handle on it of half-inch round, thirty inches long, with a ring at the end to hang it by.