To the ranchers and farmers of 1950s Texas, man’s biggest enemy is one he can’t control. With their entire livelihood pegged on the chance of a wet year or a dry year, drought has the ability to crush their whole enterprise, to determine who stands and who falls, and to take food out of the mouths of the workers and their families. To Charlie Flagg, an honest, decent, and cantankerous rancher, the drought of the early 1950s is a foe that he must fight on his own grounds. Refusing the questionable “help” of federal aid programs, Charlie and his family struggle to make the ranch survive until the time it rains again-if it ever rains again.
“Elmer Kelton does not write Westerns. He writes fine novels set in the West. Here a reader meets flesh-and-blood people of an earlier time, in a story that will grab you and hold you from the first to the last page.” —Dee Brown, author of the New York Times bestseller Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
