“I feel sorry for the man who marries her,” the richest rancher in the basin said loud enough for the whole rail to hear. She was just a poor woman carrying butter to market—straight-backed, gray-eyed, too cold to warm to. He didn’t know her name until he watched her work a gate no other man in the county could open. Then a flood came roaring down the draw with forty head of prime stock trapped in its path, and every strong man who tried that crooked iron latch failed. But she stepped into the waist-deep water, bent her head to her father’s old gate, and said the words only she knew to say. That latch had kept its secret for seventeen years—and in one breath, she unlocked the whole basin’s future.
“I feel sorry for the man who marries her,” the richest rancher in the basin said loud enough for the whole rail to hear. She was just a poor woman carrying butter to market—straight-backed, gray-eyed, too cold to warm to. He didn’t know her name until he watched her work a gate no other man…
