When I came to dress the face, I found the flaw.
There had been a bolt hole in that tire, where the wagon maker had fastened it to the felloe of the wheel. I had cut around it, or thought I had, but one of the pieces I took for the right side of the box had caught the very edge of the hole, a little crescent of it, and when I drew the bar down the hole had closed up but not welded, as a hole that size will sometimes do, and left a little pocket in the face of the bar, a cold shut, no bigger than the head of a tack. When I filed the face true it opened up. It sat about a finger's width up from the lower right-hand corner of the box, on the inside edge of the right-hand bar, and it was not a thing that would weaken the iron any, but it meant that wherever that iron was put to a hide, there would be a little round spot in the right-hand line of the brand where the hair would not burn, like a seed in a slice of bread.
I would have cut that side out and done it over, and lost a day. But it was Friday afternoon by then, and Prather came in to see how it went, and I showed him.
He looked at it a long while in his still way. He put his thumb on the little pit.
"That show on the critter?" he said.
"It'll show. A little white spot in the line. I can make it over by Monday."
"Boss wants it Saturday." He took his thumb away. "It'll do. Ain't nobody gonna look that close at a yearlin's hip."
So it did. I hardened it a little at the face and drew the temper back so it would not crack when it was quenched in a cold water bucket on the range, as branding irons always are, by men who do not care what becomes of them. And then, out of pride or habit or plain cussedness, I took my maker's punch and struck my mark on the handle, up near the ring, where a man's glove would cover it. My mark is a little anvil, a quarter-inch long, with the letters E V under it, very small. Kreuzer gave me that punch the day I finished my time, and I have struck it on everything I have made since that I was not ashamed of, and some I was. I struck it on the Double Box iron, and Prather came in the next morning and saw it there and frowned.