In Cities of the Plain, Billy Parham and John Grady Cole (the main character in All the Pretty Horses) meet up on a New Mexican ranch not far from El Paso. The first scene of the novel shows the two men, with a third cowboy, drinking at a bar in Juarez across the border from El Paso. Billy calls John Grady the all-American cowboy. We never see the character Rawlins from All the Pretty Horses again, and at the end of Cities of the Plain, we find out that John Grady has not contacted his family around San Angelo for three years, since the end of the Pretty Horses saga.
In Cities of the Plain, McCarthy provides more stories of ranching life. John Grady rides the range checking cattle and notices a small calf that runs with a strange gait. He ropes and throws the calf, ties it up, and discovers a broken-off small piece of wood pushed into the calf's inner leg. By pushing and finally using his teeth, he extracts the piece of wood. Meanwhile, the wound is infected, so he swabs it with antiseptic, which he carries in his saddlebag. In this scene, we learn why roping was such an important skill in the raising of cattle on the range. If John Grady hadn't roped and treated the calf, it would have died from the infection. In this final novel in the trilogy, John Grady is still admired and known for his expertise with horses. When a wealthy man is looking for someone to train his filly so that he can give the horse to his wife for a present, the ranch owner recommends John Grady for the job. John Grady rejects the horse because it has an invisible crack in one hoof that someone has tried to cover up. He knows the horse is lame because it twitches one ear when it steps on that hoof. The men try to bribe John Grady to keep the horse but he makes them put it back in the truck and leave.
