That Old Ace in the Hole. Annie Proulx

LaVon’s Busted Star Ranch, a little north of the Canadian River, a beautiful place. For the first time in his life he saw what extraordinary personal privacy a ranch family enjoyed. If he really were looking for a site to develop luxury homes this would be it. La Von told him the ranch had been mixed-grass grazing land – bluestem, buffalo grass, gramma, wheat grass and Indian grass – when the first settlers came into the country in the late nineteenth century. Moises Harshberger, her peripatetic grandfather, arrived in the panhandle as a young man in 1879, a year after her husband’s ancestor Fronk had taken over Mugg’s store.