Annie ate her biscuits up, slurped her coffee down, grabbed the box of shells out of the pantry, and banged out the door. She had been a tomboy her whole life, but when they lived in Tennessee she'd had to play along with young womanhood, even been courted. Things loosened up when her mother died. When they got to South Dakota and she was needed to work the ranch, they loosened some more, and they had loosened completely since her brothers and father had died. As a result, it wasn't easy to tell Annie was a woman if you saw her coming over a rise on her paint stallion, Spider, with her .30-.30 in its saddle holster, and her felt hat tugged down over her face. It was for that reason that Thomas Le Gris had hidden himself from her. He figured it was Annie, but there wasn't any reason to guess, so he'd settled down into the buffalo grass until he could see her horse well.

Annie was riding along a fenceline that followed the high line connecting the endless system of tawny hills that made up the prairie east of Baker, South Dakota, which was situated between the Oglala reservation and the Black Hills southwest of Rapid City. Once Thomas LeGris was down in the grass he didn't see any point of revealing himself to Annie. When he glimpsed her face and saw how angry she looked, he let her ride by. People said a lot of things about Annie not dying from smallpox, and about her staying on the ranch after the men died too. Thomas figured some of it might be true, and there might even be more besides all that. He liked her anyway. She was the only white person he felt comfortable around. When Annie had passed, he stood up and continued his walk towards the ranch house.

Thomas shared the same last name with Jean-Baptiste Le Gris but that was all they shared. Thomas was an Indian Le Gris, born out of wedlock at no particular time in no particular place, stamped by the name to grow the family's reach. Indian Le Gris's were all in some way descendants of Old Jean Baptiste and they often lived near the Le Gris ranch and worked it, but it did not mean they benefited from being part of the most powerful family in that region or even that they liked it. Tom was quiet, fine-boned, thick-lipped, dark, and wild. He worked when he had to or if there was something he liked. Sam Cocker had sent him over to the Quinn's place to help out after everyone was sure that Annie and Noreen weren't moving to town. He'd been walking over from his camp most days since, helping with the cattle. As far as he was concerned a ranch run by women, while against conventional logic, seemed to work out pretty well.

Annie continued along the cattle track until it turned, its line broken by a steep draw wooded with chokecherry and cottonwood. Spider scrabbled down the slope of the draw and stepped through a thick tangle of scrub before he reached the cattle track that ran right down the center of the draw. The cottonwoods cast a shade and it was cool and green there, quiet. The songbirds flickered back and forth in the dotted morning light. Annie felt the tension ease out of her neck some as Spider went deeper into the draw. It widened and its center turned marshy, cattails in the midst of cottonwoods, the big willow, all of them sucking away at the water under the ground. There were a thousand such invisible draws in that prairie. If you were new to the country and did not let your animals find them, you could die of thirst in the summer trying to cross it.