"Boss don't hold with maker's marks on brand irons," he said.
"Then he can grind it off," I said. "I put it on everything."
He looked at me, still as a cat, and then he shrugged and paid me the balance and took the iron away wrapped in a gunny sack, and I wrote it in my daybook, and pinned his paper to the board on the wall at the back of the shop, and forgot about it.
That board is something I should explain. Every smith who makes brand irons in cattle country keeps patterns, because the same outfit will come back to him year after year wanting a new iron when the old one burns out, or a second one for the calf crew, or a third for the line camp, and they expect it to come out exactly like the first or there will be trouble when the brands do not match the book. Some smiths keep them in a box. I kept mine on a great board of planed pine, six feet by four, nailed up on the back wall of the shop beside the slack tub, with every pattern I had ever drawn pinned on it, or a copy of it, some on brown paper and some on butcher's paper and some on the backs of feed bills, with the name of the outfit and the date written underneath. It had burned in the fire with everything else, of course, but I had made it over from memory and from the brand book that winter, sitting up nights in Angharad's empty kitchen with a pencil, and in the two years since it had filled up again. There were a hundred and twenty brands on it that autumn.
The Lazy H was on it. I had made Abram Hatchett's iron in the spring of 1878, the month he came up from New Mexico. I remembered it because he had drawn the brand for me himself, very carefully, on a slate, and then stood over me while I worked the way a man stands over a doctor who is treating his child. He had wanted it big and plain, so it would read from a horse's back across a creek. Two bars four and one half inches long, three inches apart, and a rung between them three inches tall, three-eighths face. A Lazy H. He had paid me in gold coin from the Army, and he had asked me to put my mark on the handle, because he said a thing made right ought to say who made it.
So now, on the second Tuesday of October, with Ballantyne's horse gone down Front Street and the boy at the second forge cutting rod, I walked back to my board and found the Double Box pattern where I had pinned it in July, on its square of brown flour paper, and I unpinned it. Then I found the Lazy H, three rows above, a pattern I had drawn again from memory that winter after the fire, on the back of an invoice from a Laramie coal yard. I unpinned that too. And I took them both to the back window of the shop, where the light came in clean and gray across the plains, and I laid the brown paper over the white and held them both up to the glass.
I had known before I did it. A man knows. I knew, and I held them up anyway.