Later that night, in a boardinghouse in Junction, Texas, suckling like an orphaned calf on his new wife's nipple as his body shook and contracted, Thomas Jefferson Power fathered the first of three sons, the one who would be called Charlie.

Will Morgan leaned against the top post of the corral. “I don't know. Maybe that roan over there.” He pointed.

“Uh-uh,” Jeff Power said. “Look at the shoulders. Always look at the shoulders.”

“Which one, then?”

“That sorrel back in the back. Solid through the shoulders and chest, and look how she keeps her ears up. That's a quality horse. That's the one you want.”

“If you say that one, then it's that one. You're a better judge of horses than I am. You may be the best one in the country.”

“May be.”

“You know, we could do all right, you and me, if we turned this cattle operation over to horses instead. They don't graze as heavy, and there ain't as much up and down in the market. There's some good money in horses.”

“Your old man is a cattleman, though. You don't move cattlemen off cattle.”

“I know, I know. He's more stubborn than the cows. But if there was two of us working him, we might be able to turn him.”

“Two of us. His son and the hired man. That's a heady combination.”

“But what if you was more than just the hired man? Let's say you was the son-in-law?”

“You mean Mattie? Marry Mattie?”

“Why not? Neither of you is getting younger.”

“I'm the hired man.”

“But I believe she'd look on you with favor.”

“I don't think so. She's nice and not at all hard to look at, but I'm just a cowboy. Rough as a shingle. You know that. She wouldn't want me.”

“Rough don't bother Mattie. She's been around cowboys all her life. Cowboys, steers, bulls, mustangs—it's all the same to her. She can handle herself. And that would make you and me brothers, buddy. And that means we could take over this operation and make it into something. The old man, he knows what he knows, but time is coming up on him and passing him by. We'd be doing him a favor.”

“I never thought of myself as the marrying kind, if you know what I mean.”

“Time is coming up on you, too. You need yourself a better life, one with some ease about it, not just beeves and busted fences. You need a home to come to and someone to look out for you and maybe someone for you to look after. This cowboying, that's a young man's game if there isn't profit in it, and there's never profit in it for cowboys, only for ranchers.”

“I guess that would be right.”