The Power claims were promising but not rich enough to warrant working by hand. Jeff looked on the neighbors’ ball mills with envy. He worked out an arrangement with one neighbor, Ed Knothe, to crush his ore in Knothe's mill, carrying the ore to Knothe's on donkeys. But the quality of the ore was poor, and Jeff was barely getting enough gold to pay for feed for the donkeys. He had been a small-time rancher much of his life, and now he was a small-time miner. He didn't see much future in either one, and now he was growing impatient. Wealth, it seemed, was always just beyond his grasp and retreated further as he went closer to it. Bad luck seemed too inevitable to be random. There was some kind of plot going on, and he was pretty sure God was in on it.

Tom and Ola May continued on with school, though Ola was more interested in her schooling than Tom was. If there was something that needed doing at the Garden or on the range, that took precedence for Tom. Likewise, if he heard someone was paying for day labor, he was happy to skip school in favor of money.

Though she was a fine rider herself, Ola May rode with Tom to the Klondyke school. So when Tom did not go, neither did Ola May. Jeff was never overly concerned with appearances, but Granny Jane insisted that an attractive young woman should not ride twelve miles unaccompanied. Ola did not miss the lessons so much as she missed the attention of the boys and the thrill of learning which of the boys had now become a stammering, fumbling idiot in her presence.

She was small, like Mattie had been, and attractive, though not so much beautiful or pretty, though her features were small and regular. There was something about the eyes, though, that rendered her very desirable. She had grown up around boys and men, with only her grandmother's female presence. She knew men. She understood their bodies and their ways, and she had developed a man's interest in the pleasures of the world.

While the other girls cast their eyes to the ground, Ola May would look a man in the eye, the slightest of smiles playing about her mouth, daring him to come closer, to make a play, to follow up on the desire that shone from his eyes. Few did. Rather, it was the boys who looked away, who looked off to the horizon in an attempt to find something there that would redeem them, confirm that they were young men, not boys, and that they were the powerful ones, the ones in charge. They never found it.