Alcott looked at the tired faces, at the stacked rifles, at the dipper going its rounds.
"Before stories," Erik said quietly. "Before any man's story, Captain — look at a thing that cannot lie and cannot be coached. You brought the twelve horses down with you to give back to their owners. They're in my corral. Come and read what's written on them. It's a short text."
Chapter 14 — What the Brands Said
They went to the corral in a body, militia and band and owners together, with the dust hanging over the rails and every man there pretending not to watch anyone else's hands.
The twelve stood bunched and blowing, still leg-weary from being driven in the night and driven again at noon. Erik worked among them the way he worked among his own — quiet, a hand speaking before the rope did — and roped out the first, a hammer-headed bay with the Ostrander O plain on its hip: a clean brand, old, healed silver-gray in the hide.
"Now look close," he said. "Over it."
Someone had taken a running iron to that horse within the week. Across the honest O a second mark crawled — an attempt at blot and flourish, meant to swallow the O into something no clerk would know. But the work was fresh as a scab and twice as clumsy: the hair at the edges singed yellow, the seared lines raised and weeping in two places, the strokes uneven, shallow here and burned deep there where a nervous hand had borne down. Beside it the old brand sat healed and certain, a thing years in the hide.
Erik ran his thumb an inch above the new work, not touching, the way you show a man a burn.
"Feel that with your eyes, Captain. Old brand: the hide has forgotten it. New work: the hide remembers it this morning. This was done days ago. Not a season ago. Days."
He moved down the line, and it was the same story twelve times, written in twelve hands' worth of fear — Lunde's Bar L under a crawling tangle, the Parr brothers' connected P with a blot burned crooked over the join, and every true mark a different farm's, and every false one fresh and botched.
On a flea-bitten gray near the end of the line the work was worst of all, and plainest to read. The iron had been run twice over the same ground, as if the hand had slipped or the horse had flinched and the man, hurried and working by lantern light, had simply burned on rather than mend it. Erik held the gray's head and spoke to Alcott without looking round.
"You have run an iron yourself, Captain, in branding season. In daylight, with the horse thrown and held and your dinner waiting on your work. Did you ever leave a mark like this on a beast you meant to keep?"
"Not since I was twelve years old," Alcott said, "and my father took the iron out of my hand for it."
"No. A man does this work at night, on his feet, on horses he hates, against a clock. Or—" Erik let the gray go and straightened up, "—he does it exactly this bad on purpose, so that any fool can see it was done. I have turned that over and over, Captain, and I cannot make the first story stand up. The second one stands by itself."
"The band's own brands," Mato said from the rail, in his careful English, "are clean. Our horses carry one mark, old. No man of the Red Willow has put an iron to a horse this autumn. My father gives any man leave to search our ponies, one by one, and find running-iron work on any one of them." He paused. "It will be a long search. Bring water."
Alcott had gone down on one knee by the bay, close as a farrier, and he stayed there a long moment with his hat in his hands, looking at the two brands the way a man looks at print in a language he has just learned to read. When he stood, his face had changed its arrangement.
"Owners," he said. "Lunde. Parr. Mrs. Ostrander's boy. Step up and claim what's yours, brand under the mess — the mess doesn't change the ownership."
They came forward, one by one, sheepish and relieved and furious by turns, and each knew his horse and said so before witnesses of both nations.
Then Alcott turned to Erik, and his voice had dropped out of its captain's register into something nearer a neighbor's.
"All right. I'm no fool with a brand, Halvorsen — I've seen running work in my time, and it's usually better than this. A thief blots a brand to keep the horse. This—" he jerked his chin at the bay, "—this was blotted to be caught at. Blotted bad, and recent, on stock driven straight into the camp of the people it was meant to hang. Who brands a horse to be found, Erik?"
"A man who isn't selling horses, Captain." Erik coiled the rope slow. "A man who is selling a story. He needed you marching, not thinking. He needed these twelve found exactly where they were found, with work on them so fresh and so bad that a town already frightened wouldn't look twice. He nearly got it, too. Another hour of the pastor's delay and you'd have come here shooting first and reading brands off dead men's horses."
On the porch step Mila sat with her beadwork in her lap and did not look up, but her needle had stopped, and Nils, by the corral gate, let out a breath he had plainly been holding since the creek.
Alcott gazed out over the bench land, where the coulees cut their shadows into the prairie grass, and asked the question the whole afternoon had been walking toward:
"If the band didn't take their herd — and God help me, I'm near persuaded — then where in His creation is it? Several hundred horses don't vanish into a dry year."