Then, in February, the rains came. February rains were good rains. They fell light but endured, sometimes falling for a couple of weeks, off and on. There was some snowpack up in the mountains that could fill the streams. And the rains kept up, harder and harder, unrelenting. They melted the snow, and they saturated the ground. The little streams swelled up, and when the river couldn't take any more, the streams overflowed. Jeff went out one morning to ride his fences, plodding through the steady, soaking rain to find a good half acre of his land gone with nearly three dozen cattle.

What forage there had been had been washed away or trampled by the goddamned cows. The roads were washed out, and there was no way, and no money, to bring in more hay. Every day, he found more of his cattle foundered in the mud or just washed downstream. In the early spring of 1904, when the rains finally stopped, Jeff Power was broke again.

He went back to Cliff. It seemed that in the worst of times, the nearness of Mattie was more than just a comfort but the answer to his problems. He had no money to speak of, and he sold the wagon and horses for six months’ rent on the same house they had left two years before. But Charlie was now fifteen. A man, basically. And John was fourteen and Tom twelve. He sent them to school because that's what you were supposed to do. He took on jobs cowboying, loading freight, and working on building crews. And when the jobs were plentiful, he pulled the boys out of school and put them to work, too. You had to use every asset you had, if you were going to survive.

So once again he had gone from well-off to dead broke. A poor man couldn't get a decent break anywhere. It was the rich bastards who got everything, mostly from each other. And God was the richest bastard of them all, happy to take from the poor to stuff the pockets of the rich.

Still, this was America, and there was always the chance of doing better. It was the land of opportunity, and if those opportunities were mainly for the rich, there was a chance you could snatch one away when one of the rich bastards was counting another pile of money. He didn't believe in God, and he didn't much believe in America, but he believed in himself, and no matter how many times he got swatted down, he was going to get back up and grab something for himself.

Whatever opportunity there was in Cliff, Jeff never found it. He had a small herd but no land, so the cost of running his cattle on private land was keeping him just about breaking even. The herd was increasing by only three or four every year. That was the slow road to the poorhouse.