While Eudora never had suffered any pangs at seeing the family brand on cattle, she had stood flat-footed against it for her pet colt. The breed of the animal was its own identification, there being no other like it on that range. It was a present from an uncle in Missouri, a breeder of fine horses. To meet the requirements of custom on the range, which was equal to law, Ellison had made with his own hands a tiny replica of his brand, which he burned into the colt's hoof, close down toward the toe where it wouldn't hurt, renewing it from time to time as the hoof grew.
Without a brand or clipping mark, or crop, as it usually was called, in the ear it was next to impossible to establish a claim of ownership in those times. This rule extended even to hogs, and is still in full observance in the Ozark mountain regions of Missouri and Arkansas, and perhaps elsewhere in the south where hogs run wild.
Now Eudora's pet, stolen early in the summer from the fenced pasture where the household cattle grazed, had come home bearing their neighbor's brand, and it would be a hard matter for her, she fully realized, to prove the horse ever had belonged to her if Coburn should take it to law. She could prove easily enough that she had owned a similar horse, but without her brand on it, not that particular one.
But Coburn must have known when he bought it from the thief—she did not believe for a moment he had come by it any other way—that it was her horse. She had paid for posters the sheriff had put up and mailed around, and distributed over the range. Everybody on that range knew she had lost her pet Hambletonian.
