The Foreman Who Claimed Her

Ellen Dunbar inherited four hundred head, forty riders, and a foreman who resents her. Rabbie Strachan ran this outfit for a year while her father was dying. He knows every path, every hand, and every reason a nineteen-year-old with a lowland accent should have stayed there. He says so. He says so at the bothy, at the poison trail, at the wall where an argument about a dead heifer turns into something neither of them will admit to the crew. Four months of correct arrangement, undone in one week without sleep. Then two riders walk out, and Ellen has to stand in front of forty men and say what she is and what he is, out loud, on purpose, on her own terms. She fires him. Then she hires him back.