‘We may as well begin, sir,’ said Dick, addressing himself to the proprietor. Then, in quite another tone, ‘Open the rails, boys; look sharp, and let ’em into the drafting-yards.’
The cattle were driven through a succession of yards after such a fashion that Wilfred was enabled to perceive how the right of choice could be exercised. By the time the operation was concluded he felt himself to be inducted into the art and mystery of ‘drafting.’ Also, he respected himself as having appreciably helped to select and separate the one hundred prepossessing-looking kine which now stood in a separate yard, recognised as his property.
‘You will have no reason to be dissatisfied with your choice,’ said O’Desmond. ‘They look a nice lot. I always brand any cattle before they leave my yard. You will not object to a numeral being put on them before they go? It will assist in their identification in case of any coming back.’
‘Coming back!—come back twenty miles?’ queried Wilfred, with amazement. ‘How could they get back such a distance?’
‘Just as you would—by walking it, and a hundred to the back of that. So I think, say, No. 1. brand—they are A1 certainly—will be a prudent precaution.’
‘Couldn’t do a better thing,’ assented Dick. ‘We’ll brand ’em again when we go home, sir; but if we lost ’em anyway near the place, they’d be all here before you could say Jack Robinson.’
A fire was quickly lighted, the iron brands were heated, the cows driven by a score at a time into a narrow yard, and for the first time in his life Wilfred saw the red-hot iron applied to the hide of the live animal. The pain, like much evil in this world, if intense, was brief; the cows cringed and showed disapproval, but soon appeared to forget. The morning was not far advanced when Wilfred Effingham found himself riding behind a drove, or ‘mob’ (as Dick phrased it), of his own cattle.
‘There goes the best lot of heifers this day in the country,’ said the old man, ‘let the others be where they may. Mr. O’Desmond’s a rare man for givin’ you a good beast if you give him a fair price; you may trust him like yourself, but he’s a hard man and bitter enough if anybody tries to take advantage of him.’
‘And quite right too, Dick. I take Mr. O’Desmond to be a most honourable man, with whom I shouldn’t care to come to cross purposes.’
‘No man ever did much good that tried that game, sir. He’s a bad man to get on the wrong side of.’