They sat and the old man told him stories about rawhiding cattle in Mexico as a young man and about Villa’s raid on Columbus New Mexico in nineteen sixteen and about sheriff’s posses tracking badmen down into the bootheel as they fled toward the border and about the drought and die-up of eighty-six and trailing north the corriente cattle that they’d bought for next to nothing up out of that stricken ground across the high parched plains. Cattle so poor the old man said that at evening crossing before the sun where it burned upon the western desert shore you could all but see through them. What
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