Even as an older young adult, John Grady still has an idealistic streak. He falls in love with a young girl who is different from the rest and starts to fix up a remote cabin on the ranch so that they can marry. He also has a very wild, half-ruined horse that he is determined to turn around. None of the other cowboys believes he can tame the horse, but John Grady proves them wrong.
At the end of Cities of the Plain, we find Billy Parham in his late seventies, wandering in Arizona at the end of the 1900s. The cities of this final novel in the trilogy are the border towns, El Paso and Juarez. Many scholars note the similarities to the biblical "cities of the plain" where Abraham and Lot settled, the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. To be sure, in the last novel of the trilogy, more corruption is present than in the first two books.
The end is near and the image of John Grady on his horse, horse and rider appearing as one, is soon to be extinct. Man's connection with nature, his oneness with it, is at an end.
