Alexander Adams, narrator.

In the fall of 1952, John Grady Cole and Billy Parham--nine years apart but bound by a powerful boyhood kinship--are cowboys on a New Mexico ranch just north of El Paso. To the north, the miliary is already encroaching upon the ranch. To the south, always on the horizon are the mountains of Mexico, looming over El Paso, Cuidad Juarez and all the cities of the plain. Indeed, Mexico is the beckoning far country, boasting many of the qualities that the American West has lost. And what draws one of them across the border again and again is his love for a young Mexican girl, in fact a teenage prostitute, who he vows to rescue at any cost.