My Mate Cut My Brand Off, So the Outcast Wolf Claimed Me novel · Chapter 24 of 24
Chapter 24: The Bare Iron
The Association held its spring branding at Willow Creek that year, in my father's corrals.
Nobody had to be asked.
By eight in the morning the first Saturday of May was bright and cold, and two hundred people stood along my fence.
The branding fire popped in its pit, and the calves bawled in the pen.
On the far side the old iron, the Association's big one, the one for calves, lay in the coals with its end going red.
It was the only iron that fire held.
The vote had been on the fourth of April, in the fairground hall, and it hadn't taken long.
The chairman had asked who wanted the Calling held again.
Not one hand went up.
He asked who wanted it ended, and every hand in the hall went up so fast he stopped counting.
So there was no Book that morning, and no Caller reading a page the night before.
No one stood at the fire waiting to be burned.
Wrists stayed bare.
I looked down the fence and saw it, couple after couple, sleeves rolled to the elbow in the sun.
The old woman and her husband stood shoulder to shoulder with their hands joined.
A young pair I hardly knew were laughing at something, with her head on his arm.
Dell stood at the gate with a heeler pup at her feet and a vet's smock over her jeans.
At the far corral, hanging on a gate in a hat that was not his own, Cade Reinholt worked a calf chute for daily wages.
He had sold the home place in March.
Nobody had spoken to him that morning.
His father's truck sat at the end of the lane with the engine off and the window up.
Einar did not get out.
Ona came across the yard with her white braid down her back and a leather roll in her hands.
She walked slowly, and the people at the fence moved to let her through.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of My Mate Cut My Brand Off, So the Outcast Wolf Claimed Me are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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