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Updated: September 21, 2025
Facing eastward, I left behind me Smithfield and Old Bailey, fire and faggot, condemned hold, public hanging, whipping through the city at the cart-tail, pillory, branding-iron, and other beautiful ancestral landmarks, which rude hands have rooted up, without bringing the stars quite down upon us as yet, and went my way upon my beat, noting how oddly characteristic neighbourhoods are divided from one another, hereabout, as though by an invisible line across the way.
In those excellent olden times of Europe, hangmen, doubtless, carried about written characters from lord to lord, certifying their experience with rope and axe branding-iron and thong. So long as the Inquisition afforded constant work for able hands, a good hangman out of place must have been a treasure!
I have seen the principle of coöperation developed to the highest point in the ranching industry in the days of the unfenced range. Our cattle used to roam at large, the only means of identifying them being certain registered marks made by the branding-iron and the knife.
Everett's Oration at the inauguration of the Webster statue, a fugitive slave appeared at his door, and, baring his breast and back, showed him the marks of the branding-iron, and the scars from the lash. At the sight, he says, the paper dropped from his hand. He "thought of Webster and the Fugitive Slave Law."
He turned in his saddle and through the empty valley shouted an insulting name at her. Then Y.D. slowly began to feel his face burn with a fire not of the branding-iron nor of the afternoon sun. He knew that his word was a lie. He knew that he would not have dared use it in her father's hearing. He knew that he was a coward.
That open-faced countenance of yours would give you away even if your tongue didn't. I'd say you weren't a bit in love with Lynch, or any of the rest of the bunch, either. Likely you got a good reason, an' of course it ain't any of my business; but if that stunt with the red-hot branding-iron is a sample of their playfulness, I should think you'd drift.
The man had evidently been drinking heavily, for his face was flushed. "Mr. Fearnot," he fairly roared, "you refused to give me work this morning, and yet an hour later you took on another man. Now I've got to have work or know the reason why, or else clean out the whole ranch!" and he flourished the branding-iron above his head in a most threatening manner. "It's work or fight," he continued.
For twenty years, right through, he has steadily sucked the old man's blood. Slick? Say a six-year-old steer don't know more about a branding-iron than does Verner Lablache about his business. For every dollar uncle's lost he's made him sign a mortgage. Every bit of paper has the old man had to redeem in that way. What he's done lately I mean uncle I can't say.
Officers, who looked as though in times of peace they might be gentlemen jockeys, were receiving the remounts and identifying the brands on the hoof and shoulder that had been made by their agents in America. If the veterinary passed the horse, he was again marked, this time with regimental numbers, on the hoof with a branding-iron, and on the flanks with white paint.
Y.D. was sufficiently drunk to be supersensitive about his honor, and the inference from Wilson's remark was that he was too handy with his branding-iron. "No, boys, no!" he protested. "I'll make that Englishman eat his words or choke on them." "That's right," the company agreed. "The only thing to do. We'll all go down with you." "An' you won't do that, neither," Y.D. answered.
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