Deadwood Season 1 Episode 2 - What is "flag T"?

In the Season 1 Episode 2 there is the following dialoge:

...

(Tom Mason bursts into the office, stark naked, holding his dick.)

Tom: This snatch is branded'! (Laughing – Al still has Phil by the collar, pinned down on the floor – they both look at Tom, frozen in place.) What, what happened?

Phil: Ah, tipped over.

Al: And I'm helpin' him up. Put your iron away now, Tom.

Tom: Ah, not yet! Burned it at the flag T! (Heads back to the whore's room)

...

I've searched for idiom or slang expression, but find none. What is

... at the flag T!

referring to, in the context?

Best Answer

I believe it's an extended metaphor in which Tom's penis is a branding iron and the "flag T" is both what his brand looks like and the name of his imaginary ranch.

Tom says "This snatch is branded" while holding his penis; the insinuation is that his penis is a branding iron and he has branded the prostitute's vagina.

Al gets the joke and ask's Tom to put his "[branding] iron away now."

Tom replies "Ah, not yet"--meaning he isn't finished with the prostitute. Then says "Burned it at the flag T." I think what this means is that his saying his brand is a Flag shape with a T inside it.

My reasoning: there are ranches at which the brand was a letter inside a shape and the ranches were named for the brand. You can google "Circle K ranch," "Square H ranch," "Cross E ranch," or "Diamond M ranch" for examples. So maybe when Tom says "the flag T" he is imagining a ranch of his own at which animals are branded with a T (for Tom) inside a flag. So he burned it--the "whore's snatch"--at the flag T ranch. This is speculation--I could not find an example of a ranch called the "Flag [Letter] Ranch," but it is consistent with how other ranches were named.

Basically a very crude and misogynistic metaphor for having sex with a woman, which is in character for a member of Persimmon Phil's gang of road agents.