They owned gifts of the earth—land, cattle—and had money in the bank. They were not grasping, not asking for more. They had come by it hard, yet it had not hardened them. Many thought the Winterses were strange, not easy to know. The womenfolk did not “hang on the telephone,” which meant they had no confidantes. Any news of them was difficult to come by. On the paternal side, they were a transplanted Appalachian family. Big Jack's speech bore the imprint of his early years in Western North Carolina, with a dash of West Tennessee. As for the maternal side—who knew? Anson's mother had said that Big Jack had “carried her off” when she was not much more than a child of sixteen and he almost twice her age. “I didn't even love him,” she'd say, “then.” But she came to love him, and she came to love the Bent Y Ranch, where they eventually set up housekeeping after leaving Chinaberry. The Bent Y had begun from scratch, ranch land without so much as a cow. A few mavericks were branded, and among the calves there came a bull of stamina and quality.
