Will knew what Jeff was doing, and they supposed Sebe knew as well. Sebe's knowledge of the business presented no threat, as Sebe, unless he was eating, sleeping, or shitting, was sitting on the porch alone, trying to stare down the horizon or whittling sticks until they were nothing more than an excuse to cut himself, whereupon he would throw the bloody stick away and start another.

But McCrory and Walters, two ranchers from just north of Silver City, both prosperous and fully expecting to become even more so, began to eye each other's prosperity, supposing that it came at their own expense. One of McCrory's men shot Walters's middle son near the stock tank, arguing that the Walters boy had been cutting McCrory cattle into his own string. Walters's son had, in fact, done that, but the McCrorys had always taken their share of Walters's cattle, too. A district judge in Silver City found the evidence too slight to indict a hand from one of the most prosperous ranches in the area.

Tensions mounted. There was no more killing in the winter of 1892–93, but the feed and supply in Silver City was stocking more and more barbed wire. In the spring, Mattie gave birth to their third son, Thomas Jefferson Power, Jr. He was born small and sickly but grew to be small and tough.

Jeff hated barbed wire. It was bad for business. But that spring there were crews out every day, stringing the damned stuff across the valley, sectioning out each ranch. Surveyors weren't used. Each rancher had a fair idea of where his ranch left off and his neighbor's began. But the ranchers never agreed on the boundaries and often argued that one ranch's wire cut into another's land.

Jeff tried to ignore the whole business, letting his cattle run where they had always run and leaving it to other ranchers’ wire to keep them in more or less the same position. The problem was the stock tank. While Jeff had running water on his land, the water routinely gave out in late spring and did not come back until after the July rains. The stock tank had always been considered communal property, and all the ranchers contributed to its upkeep. Jeff had spent a good number of hours twenty feet off the ground, freeing jammed gears and straightening bent windmill blades. But the tank and mill weren't on his property, and he was given notice by McCrory that it was going to be fenced in with McCrory's land and that Jeff needed to make some other arrangements.