Like most of the properties in southern California at that time, the Burn ranch was mired in litigation. The sheriff held a writ of ejection, but out of respect for John Evert’s mother, or some other mysterious principle, he had not seen fit to issue it. John Evert’s father had been a Scotsman, by all accounts a fine man, a decorated soldier of the Mexican War, a hard worker who had transformed the fertile but unruly land of the ranch into a going concern. A man of vision, he had diverted the course of the river, damming and dividing its flow, so that it flooded and watered a greater area of pasture. Yet he had made sure that the tributaries he had broken were rejoined to filter back to the original path where the river left his property. A fair man, he took for himself, but never at the expense of another. He had passed when John Evert was five years old. Now, at the age of fifteen, John Evert possessed but one clear memory of him: a large, steady hand in the small of his back, supporting him as he rode a horse for the first time.

According to John Evert’s mother, his father’s death had had a profound effect upon him. Prior to it, he had been a happy, laughing child, gregarious with strangers. Afterward, he became silent and taciturn, and never quite recovered from this early loss. Perhaps it might have been different had he a brother or sister but, as it was, he was never again entirely at ease in company. Yet whatever his reservations when it came to people, he had a way with horses, and with all things that loped and scuttled and flew. Where words might fail him, sensitivity did not: he could read the thoughts of animals and knew their goodness, and they, in turn, were drawn to him. His mother’s temper had been sorely tested by the baby possums and fallen fledglings that she would come across in makeshift nests within her laundry. She had forbidden him to bring any more animals into the house, but when one of the mares disappeared and later returned in foal, John Evert had spent twenty-four hours with her, first in the blazing sun, then out in the dark, delivering the foal single-handed by the light of an oil lamp. After that, his mother no longer chastised him.

At one time, the ranch had boasted a thousand head of cattle, but now there were just a few hundred, while their mounts consisted of a few sway-backed, slab-sided mustangs, sorry excuses for horses. The fields of wheat had been reduced to a fraction of their former size and wild mustard now grew taller than a man in many areas, amid the Indian paintbrush. John Evert was not concerned with what the ranch might once have been: he lived in the present.