He took what little money he had left and half the cattle from the ranch, and then he headed upriver away from Cliff and started his own small ranch. It was good to be living with Granny Jane and the children, but he hated like hell to be leaving Mattie again. He wasn't about to lose all his hard-earned money on the foolishness of a rummy, though. He personally couldn't stand the type. He hated weak.

He prospered yet again. Prospering seemed easy. Holding on to prosperity was a lot harder. It seemed that things just stacked up against a man. By late 1902 he had a herd of 1,145 cattle, which made him neither rich nor powerful but showed him for the quality of man he was, a hardworking, smart operator, able to march right through the tough times. His former partner had sold out what remained of the herd for three years’ worth of whiskey and considered himself successful as well.

A drought is a terrible thing. You're deep into it by the time you realize that's what this is. Not that it matters. There's little to be done about a drought. It had started with a mild winter that seemed benign, dropping only a couple of feet of snow in the lower elevations of the Mogollon Mountains. But come spring, the snowmelt was only a few trickles in the streambeds that were gone by June. The clouds built in the summer as they were supposed to do but hung in the south or skirted off to the east. By fall the situation was getting dire. He hired a team to dismantle his windmill and drop dynamite down the well to bust up the rock and free the deeper water to come into the basin. The dynamite merely blew hell out of the rock, and he ended up with a well ten feet shallower than before. The flakes of snow that swirled in January and February seemed only to mock him. He wished he held more with the idea of a kind and merciful God, because he wanted to curse hell out of Him.

He had no choice but to start selling his herd. It was underweight, and the price of beef had gone completely to hell, as everyone else was trying to sell their beef as well. He kept a couple hundred head that could live off the few springs that still ran, and he used the rest of the money to buy alfalfa from southern Texas, where it seemed all the clouds were heading. He had enough cattle, water, and feed to last six months. If the rains started up before then, he was well set to start building the herd again. If the drought continued, he and every other rancher as far as he knew were just waiting to be cut up for silage by the banks.