Amos Judson

In the Homeric age of settlement he shot Jesus Montaña over the Greenfields water and passed into tradition, and every subsequent owner of Greenfields bought the ranch with Amos in full view. His long feud ends not with gunfire but with Diedrick's large wife sitting on the headgate with a long-handled shovel, knitting through the sun while the water ran into her ditch—and Amos, too much of a gentleman to fight a lady, gave up. He matters because his stubborn, violent, finally almost comic claim to water distills what the desert thinks as it slips past the gardens.