And then there were the obstacles of flat country, because, in the end, there was no such thing as flat country. There were washes and creeks, rocks and hummocks that had to be negotiated. And fences. Always fences. It wouldn't be as dark as when they had left the Galiuros. The moon was not quite half now. There still wouldn't be a lot of light, and they wouldn't be able to see long distances. They would be forever climbing over barbed wire and either jumping or slogging through irrigation ditches.

They, all three of them, had been cowboys. And they owed part of their lives to cattle. But it was easy to see that cattle were killing the country. The old ones talked about long fields of grama grass, stirrup-high. And it was that grass that brought the cattle. Those first ranchers thought they had unending grazing lands of sweet grass that would go on forever.

But cattle just eat grass. They don't replant it. And the grass had given way to cactus and the tough, thorny plants of the new valley—creosote, catclaw, Russian thistle, the scrubbier lower grasses, and saltbush, jojoba, and greasewood. The ground dried, cracked, and got rockier. The rainwater wasn't held, and runoff cut arroyos and streams across the land.

They would come across the land of cattle. It was a good thing, he thought, that cows were so damned tasty. Because there wasn't another good reason to have them out here. He had loved them when he was cowboying because cows create work, lots of work. But now he was a miner, and cows were mostly a big, shitting annoyance.

They slowed as they came down from the mountain. The Dragoon Mountains were formed by the swift upheaval of rock as tectonic plates shifted during the Mesozoic era and seemed to have simply erupted from the ground. The foothills were small—low and short—and gave small transition from the mountain to the valley below. But they were wooded foothills, and that provided plenty of cover. The moon gave some light, but not enough that the men's movements would stand out.

The advantage to them was a similar advantage to those who were pushing them. In the near darkness, it would be possible for a man, or even several men, for that matter, to hide themselves behind trees and rocks. And as long as they stayed quiet and still, it would be possible for the brothers to walk right up onto them without being aware of their presence.