He Hired a Widow to Cook for 26 Fence Hands—She Turned His Burned Bee Yard Into a Honey Trade

He Hired a Widow to Cook for 26 Fence Hands—She Turned His Burned Bee Yard Into a Honey Trade Crook County, Oregon, September of 1884. Warren Teague bought a burned quarter section on Slade Creek at a county tax sale, and he has twenty-six men on it to rebuild nine miles of drift fence before the first snow closes the road. He advertises in the Prineville paper for a cook: twenty-six men, two meals a day, six weeks certain, seven dollars the week and found. Ada Marchbanks is thirty-seven. She has ninety cents, a canvas grip, a bed on the alley side at a dollar and a quarter the week, and eleven days of laundry work behind her. She takes the job on one condition, which is that she keeps her afternoons, and Warren hires her without asking one question about her. He never asks her married name, and neither does any man in that camp. She is the widow of the man who homesteaded Slade Creek. She signed the quitclaim to the county herself, in a good clear hand, when the tax fell due after the fire that killed him. Up on the bench above the creek her husband's forty scorched bee gums are still standing, in a burn that has gone over horizon to horizon in fireweed, and in fourteen months on that ground the man who owns it has never once looked up the hill. Western frontier romance, homestead drama, a widow the county had already written off - fiction. New story every 48 hours. Subscribe and you will not miss one. #westernromance #frontier #historicalromance