My Mate Cut My Brand Off, So the Outcast Wolf Claimed Me novel · Chapter 20 of 24

Chapter 20: The Gather

Roderick's POV

The herds came down off the Forest on the eighteenth of October, nine hundred head of cows and calves, bawling in the cold.

Every ranch in the Association rode behind them.

The pens at the foot of the mountain were packed with trucks, trailers and people by noon.

I stood in the sorting alley with my heeler and my hat pulled low.

I had stood in that alley every October for fifteen years.

This was the first year anyone had spoken to me in it.

Men I had known all my life came up to shake my hand.

A woman brought me a plate of rolls, and I held it for ten minutes because I did not know where to put it.

The older board man had been voted into the chair in August.

He climbed the stock-scale platform at two with a clipboard, and the yard went quiet.

"The Association will decide the matter of the stand," he said. "Roderick Reimer stood for Marit Halvorsen on the third of May.

"A year and a day isn't up, but the law says the Association decides today.

"Where is she?"

I turned my head.

I had left her at the Halvorsen string at dawn.

She had said she would see me at the pens, and that she had something to do first.

I had felt all day that something was coming, and I could not tell what.

"She's not here," somebody said.

"She's here," someone else said, and pointed up the road.

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