The next morning the broker came. He went over the little herd carefully. Jeff was going to explain that some of the cattle were not his and that the broker could simply hold that money for the rightful owners. But the broker ran his hands over the mismatched brands and said nothing. In the end, Jeff got paid for eighteen head, six more than he actually owned. The broker's men came and took the cattle and headed them on. It was the most profitable transaction that Jeff had ever completed. He held on to the money for the six beeves that weren't his, and he waited a couple of weeks for neighboring ranchers to complain about the loss of their cattle. None did.

It seemed simply part of the cost of doing business. If the broker didn't give a damn about brands, Jeff didn't see why he should. He had had a prosperous year and would have the funds to double his run next year. New Mexico, he thought, less burdened by ethics and intelligence than Texas, was a damned good place to do business.

And he did well. He increased his herd by nearly triple in two years. His first boy, Charlie, survived the croup and the measles and thrived under the care of Mattie and Granny Jane. The second boy, John, followed soon after, in the spring of 1891. He was a big, raw-boned boy who sailed through the first treacherous twelve months of his life without much more than snotty noses and achy ears.

The news of the shooting came when Charlie was two and John one. Mattie was again pregnant. Two ranchers had gotten into it over the rightful ownership of a couple dozen cattle. What had begun as simply the vagaries of business and the laxity of the cattle broker had grown over the years until it became outright theft. While most of the ranchers running cattle around Duck Creek were willing to let some of their cattle be sold by a neighboring rancher while they sold another's cattle, so long as the numbers came out more or less right, the numbers were now getting further and further from right.

Jeff had been careful to increase his herd through the sale of other cattle only slightly, taking one or two cattle from other herds, rarely coming in with more than six or eight cattle that weren't his. It gave him a slight advantage in a highly speculative business, and it was just enough to not arouse a lot of suspicion. He was always careful to leave a couple of his cows on the range for others to pick up, just to keep the appearance of fairness. He was not making a lot of money, but he managed to increase the size of his herd and to turn small but steady profits each year.