Chapter One

ONE

A dry wind blows hard out of the Medicine Bow Mountains onto the high plateau of the Laramie River, just as it does every fall in the southeast part of the state. It's a steady pressure, as unrelenting as gravity, but also a force that seems to have a mischievous intent. The wind is regularly fed by the curses of the fifty thousand enduring souls who inhabit the high plains and mountains here. On this day its fuel is further charged by the oaths of people who have never before had the opportunity to feel its power. The multitudes of television reporters gathered outside on the courthouse lawn offer up foul maledictions. The wind is blowing their carefully brushed and stiffened hair out of place. Propelled by it, the occasional tumbleweed playfully interrupts their broadcasts as it bounces between the commentators and cameras. The few forlorn Klansmen isolated even amid the crowd across the street curse the wind too. It threatens to blow their pointed hoods right off their heads and reveal their true identities. Worse than that, it raises their robes like women's skirts, causing them to drop their placards and hold their arms straight down at their sides.

On the drive in this morning I'd been struck by just how much the prairie fauna surrounding Laramie is like my maternal grandfather's ranch in Argentina. There's the same sagebrush and chaparral bent by the wind toward the east, as if yearning for the sun to rise each dawn and exposing their backsides' naked roots to the fading night. There are the same surrounding high peaks capped with ice. But the town itself is nothing like my grandfather's nearest village, where idle gauchos squat on crooked, unpaved streets, and