It comes from the Traveler-Ronda line of horses of Sheeran’s that was sold in Mexico, he says. He points out one of the horses, who, like the others, comes from a horse called José Chiquito. John Grady says that the hacendado apparently has four hundred horses all over the mountain, having started a breeding program for quarterhorses.

In the second section, he is both reticent and. In the first section he seems a confused sixteen year-old boy, at once cocky and awkward. Rawlins doubts whether four days is enough, and says John Grady will surely be worn out, if he ever manages. The long first chapter of All the Pretty Horses can be divided into two parts - John Grady Cole emotionally distancing himself from his home in San Angelo, then John Grady Cole physically leaving it. John Grady wonders if they could break all sixteen in four days-train them enough to stop and stand to be saddled. But John Grady says that some of them have potential-he points out two that he claims are good horses, though Rawlins is skeptical, suggesting that John Grady has lost his touch. All the Pretty Horses is a heros quest without a neat resolution, a book in which the strange light of mythic struggles shines through the quick-paced. As they open the gate the animals get spooked and climb over one another frantically.

Small parts of the book are incomprehensible, unless the reader knows native Mexican, but no large part of the story is lost or wasted on the reader who fails this particular. That evening Rawlins and John Grady look them over. Book one of the Border Trilogy - All The Pretty Horses - is at times hysterically funny, incredibly profound, relatively violent, moving (of course), and at times, tragic. On the third day the vaqueros bring a herd of wild colts into the pen. For two days, John Grady and Rawlins brand, castrate, dehorn and inoculate the cattle in the holding pens.

All the pretty horses novel