The Reverend Barnwell wound up his sermon and bowed his head to lead the congregation in prayer. Eli was not much for religion, but this young man had said it about as well as it could be said. Our nation lies broken as a tree… That just about summed it up.

Through the spring and into the summer of 1933, Eli worked to save the 8T8. Juanita drove him to meetings with bankers in Casper and Sheridan, where he fought for extensions, for lower interest rates, for some degree of understanding that the whole country was caught up in drought and depression and that, if people didn’t help one another, they would all go under. During the meetings, Eli was as canny and unbending as ever, but each encounter with the bankers took its toll. They would step into the Pontiac for the ride back to the ranch, she would glance over and see his face, gray with fatigue. All through spring roundup, he was on horseback as much as he could stand, but it didn’t amount to much more than an hour a day. He had to depend on Ezra and Two Spuds and Willie Thaw to tell him how many spring calves had survived, the shape of the grassland, the health of the cattle. He fidgeted and fussed and worried. He could deal with almost any obstacle if he could face it himself. Relying on others, even when they were trustworthy men with long experience, drove him to distraction.

Piece by piece, Eli sold off a little less than half of the 8T8’s original hundred thousand acres, some of it in parcels of as little as a section. A Scottish industrialist, smitten with Wyoming, overpaid for ten thousand acres of the worst land on the 8T8, simply because he wanted a place to hunt. Each sale felt like the loss of a rib, but by June, Eli had managed to pay off in full two of the banks that held notes on the ranch and bring his payments up to date with the other two. He sold some of his breeding stock, including two prize bulls, to pay off the rest. He cut back the number of cattle he had on the range to a fraction of what he had owned before the drought. By the Fourth of July, he told Ezra and Juanita that he felt they were in a position where they could hunker down and wait it out. Wait out the drought, wait out the depression, wait for better times. He said it and he believed it, but he knew that one more calamity could be the end. Hail, prairie fire, a grasshopper plague.