It had not been his fault. Some of it was, maybe. But not all of it. There had been a decline in the market for horses not long after Jeff and Will Morgan had sold most of Sebe's cattle and bought horses. They lost thirty-eight horses to the sleeping sickness. It was a run of rotten luck. They had tried to wait it out, but while they waited on the market, the horses kept eating, foaling, sickening, breaking bones, and just dying off. Each new foal that increased the herd by one increased the expenses by some multiple of that. Sebe, it turned out, hadn't been as successful raising cattle as Jeff had thought. He was running a lot of debt, more debt than cattle. They had sold the Texas ranch and put the money into cattle in the high hills of New Mexico, close to Silver City, back when Charlie was still on the tit.

Sebe had not been happy. His son and new son-in-law, he was happy to tell anyone who would listen, were as ignorant as they were proud of what they supposed to be their wisdom, intelligence, and ambition. But what Sebe saw was only the greed, incompetence, and brash, unfounded confidence of the merely young. But he was old and getting bad busted up, gored by a bull two years earlier, the wound never healing right and leaving him slow and pained. The work got left to the boys and, with it, the management of the ranch. It was like burning money. He gave it all another two years, maybe three, and they'd all be broke, but he was pretty much done anyway, and if wanting had any power, he'd be dead by then, though he was fond of little Charlie and would miss seeing him grow up.

Sebe's pain and waning interest in anything that required him to get up or even wake up left a vacancy of intelligence and experience in running a ranch. Will and Jeff Power put their heads together and came up with a series of plans for their future success that put them all on a beeline for the poorhouse.

Nature, and that is everything you can actually think of, abhors a vacuum. So where there was no good sense or even common sense, the vacuum attracted intelligence, grit, and power. And that was Granny Jane Power, Jeff's widowed mother. Sebe thought her a holy terror and tried his busted-up best to just get out of her way.