The deference was both a pleasure and a disappointment. She wanted to find the boy who would hold her look, who would take the dare and try to show his will was greater than hers. She would find him, but she hadn't yet. She took her pleasure, then, in the rejection, the boyish surrender that inevitably followed. She was a Power, after all, and tougher than the rest, and if she barely held her own against the men of her family, she towered over all other boys, though she was barely five feet tall.

But she was also jealous of the girls around her, the ones who dropped their gaze and reddened their faces when boys looked at them with desire. They got their books carried and extra treats at lunch. And they got to go to the dances at the LDS stake center and at the fairgrounds. She envied them and she wanted them. She wanted them to be pliant and deferential to her the way they were with the boys. She heard the whispering, knew that they called her a tomboy, a puss, a bitch, and a harlot behind her back while they pretended to be nice as pie to her face. She sometimes had the desire to take one of them and push her into a wall or a corner and then push herself onto the now-frightened girl, covering and crowding her like she knew some men did to low women, just to show who was boss. Instead, she reduced their admirers and boyfriends to helpless twits whose fumblings in the dark later would be as tainted with her image as they were awkward.

Tom met Bob Wootan, who made extra cash by putting on rodeos outside of the various small towns of Cochise, Graham, and Gila Counties. Rodeos had been officially banned in Arizona for their inherent cruelty to animals. As Arizona marched toward statehood, it was eliminating all things that might trigger organized protest against its admission to statehood.

But there was also an abundance of wild burros in southern Arizona. Abandoned by miners, the burros thrived in the desert by virtue of their ability to survive on little food and water and a general absence of predation. The state allowed anyone with a mind to to round up and keep wild burros.

Like a few others, Wootan found the burros profitable. Wild, the burros were hard to ride, but they were low to the ground and, therefore, less likely to do damage to their would-be riders. Burro rodeos were becoming a popular, though illegal, entertainment, traveling from small town to small town, setting up for a day or so, and providing the opportunity for various sorts, from leading lights to staggering drunks, to get slammed to the ground by kicking, braying burros and then stand up, wipe themselves off, and try again.