This book finds the brothers Alfredo and Francisco Guerrero finally going in their own directions toward the future.
Alfredo is off to the university, and Francisco is being groomed for the job as foreman of the hacienda.
Both brothers will marry the two sisters Carmela and Alberta. Alfredo getting the girl of his dreams and now the love of his life, Alberta.
While Francisco will marry Carmela, the woman that he loves, but theirs will be a contentious marriage. She never loves him, treats him with contempt, and through sexual manipulation, dominates the marriage.
Alfredo goes through the rudiments of school and finds that his teacher is a hard task master. While Francisco is schooled in the classroom of the hacienda in how to be the foreman that he will have to be by Pedro Carillo, the oldest vaquero on the hacienda.
We left Francisco breaking horses along with the vaqueros in the West Meadows, where one of the vaqueros had been killed by a rogue horse and where Carmela was a witness to that death.
