It was impossible to keep his mind on other things when it kept circling back to Velma, but Eli was feeling of late like a man holding a pair of deuces in a high-stakes poker game. He had spent a lifetime battling heat and drought, blackleg, quicksand, rustlers, outlaws, bankers, blizzards, hail, flood. He had never faced anything like this almighty depression that had the whole country in a choke hold. Wheat was going for thirty-seven cents a bushel, a man was lucky if a field would produce eight bushels of smutty wheat to an acre. Cattle wouldn’t bring the price of shipping them to market.

He couldn’t see how things would get better anytime soon. The country was more than three years into this, and unless FDR had a miracle up his sleeve, it would be years before folks were back to work. He heard it was bad back east, but it couldn’t come close to what farmers and ranchers were going through from Montana to Texas, heat and drought and wind and millions of acres of good earth simply blowing away. Farmers were so desperate they were grinding and salting Russian thistle to keep their stock alive. Cattle would eat it, horses wouldn’t touch it. His ranch was in better shape than most, but he could ride miles on parts of his own spread and see nothing but sage, juniper, thistle, not a blade of grass in sight.

He still owed four banks for loans he had taken to buy the hundred thousand acres of the 8T8 back in 1927, when wheat and cattle were worth something. The purchase might have made sense if the rain had not ceased to fall and if the prices for cattle and wheat hadn’t collapsed. He had loaned out money himself, nearly a hundred thousand dollars, most of it to neighboring ranchers who had lost their shirts in the stock market crash in ’29. The loans were of the low-interest, pay-me-when-you-can variety, but he knew that he would never see a dime on the dollar. Three of the men who owed him money had already lost their ranches to foreclosure, others were teetering on the brink. The Cadillac he drove was all he would ever see for a loan made to Orie Achenbach, a rancher who had lost it all betting on General Electric and RCA. Eli would have preferred horses, but Achenbach had already sold off all his livestock.