The first man (perhaps the only man) to rope the black was Farron Blue, a wrangler and bronc buster out of Pocatello who had blown around the west like a tumbleweed, maybe because he had a bad habit of getting himself wanted by the wrong people. Farron was wanted in eastern Washington for a misunderstanding about a horse, in southwestern Colorado for shooting holes in a sheriff’s patrol car and in Medicine Hat by Ilah Pattee, who stood six foot three and weighed two hundred and eighty pounds. Ilah ran a saloon and carried a double-bladed axe, the head pounded down onto a hatchet handle eighteen inches along. She could throw that axe fifty feet and hit what she was aiming at, and the thing she was aiming at when he left town was Farron Blue. What exactly Farron had done to rile Miss Pattee was not known, except that he was an unusually handsome cowpoke with a fondness for women of considerable size, so it is possible that their mutual inclinations led to a clash that might have been fatal, had Farron not decided to hightail it south and cross the U.S. border before Ilah could get within axe range. He drifted through Montana into Wyoming and found pretty much the same thing he had seen everywhere in the west—starving beef, outfits going broke, drought and heat so bad that buzzards wouldn’t leave the shade to peck at a ripe carcass. Working cows in such weather was somewhere well to the south of purgatory. A man spent long hours in the saddle with a wet dust rag over his face and Vaseline up his nose so that it wouldn’t get raw from breathing dust and still he crawled into his bedroll at night feeling like he’d just swallowed half the dirt in Wyoming, with a little chili sauce and some kidney beans to wash it down.

While he was working for Eli Paint on the 8T8, Farron teamed up with Ignacio Salazar. Ignacio was an old hand who had drifted north from Texas after the IXT ranch was turned under by the plow, a mistake that provided a million acres of blowing dirt for the southern rim of the Dust Bowl. By 1937, Farron and Ignacio had both had enough of dust and heat. When the spring roundup was done, they decided to try to make their fortune horse hunting up in the high country. They were going to see if they couldn’t track down this legendary stallion they called the black, but if they didn’t run into any mustangs at all, they would at least have cool nights and cold springwater and as fine a view of the slow-wheeling stars at night as a man could have on this earth.