From Saltillo, John Grady catches rides north on a truck with farm workers whose goodwill he appreciates. They arrive in Monclova at midnight. He sleeps on a bench and the next day has a breakfast of coffee and pan dulce before catching two more rides. He bathes in an irrigation ditch and starts to walk toward Cuatro Cienagas. Everyone speaks to John Grady as they pass, and, in the evening, workers in a camp invite him to supper. Through a series of rides, he makes his way beyond Nadadores, out of La Madrid, and into La Vega. After buying a Coke in a small store, he starts walking toward La Purisima, and after dark he knocks on the manager’s door, only to find that Sr. Rocha and Alejandra are in Mexico City. Antonio gives John Grady his and Rawlins’ belongings.
John Grady sleeps in his old room in the barn, and, in the morning at breakfast, he is told that Alejandra’s great-aunt has invited him to see her that evening at ten o’clock. He asks if he can ride the horse, and he takes the stallion out for the day, riding across the lands of the beautiful hacienda. He thinks of Alejandra and Blevins. At one point, he passes a dead colt being devoured by buzzards. Later, he comes upon an abandoned cabin. He picks an apple, but it is too green to eat and the cattle have eaten all the ripened apples from the ground. The stallion is nervous in the old cabin and, on the ride home, is afraid of its own shadow.
He has a cigarette with the vaqueros who ask him about Rawlins, whom they miss. They tell John Grady the news, but nothing of the Rocha family. He goes to the kitchen and waits to see the old señorita. Alejandra’s great-aunt tells John Grady he has been a great disappointment to Sr. Rocha and a great expense to her. He replies, “I’ve been some inconvenienced myself.” John Grady is angry that he didn’t have the opportunity to tell his side of the story. She says that the Rocha family had John Grady investigated, and they found he lied twice. She confirms what he had suspected—that Alejandra promised never to see him again if the aunt paid for him to be released. They argue about the recent events, and then the great-aunt tells John Grady more of her life’s story, about the Mexican Revolution and the Maderos. She talks about her father and his philosophy. She recounts the poverty in Mexico when she was young. She explains how Gustavo Madero helped her face her handicap after the shooting accident and how he was brutally treated—burned and shot after his arrest. She relates how Francisco Madero was also shot and how the family went into exile. She talks about the bonds of grief, about how she stayed in Europe and taught school in London until after her father’s death. Now she visits his grave near the house and talks to him. John Grady asks again to be able to make his case, and she tells him she knows his case.
The next morning John Grady tells his friends goodbye and picks out the horse he calls “Rawlins’ grullo.” At noon, near farmland, he stops to have his lunch given to him at the hacienda, and he shares it with some children who want to know his story. So he tells them of Rawlins and Blevins and Alejandra. An older girl tells him he is forgetting that he is poor and the family is rich. She says he should appeal to the “grandmother,” meaning the oldest female member of his intended’s family. When he tells them that is not possible, they suggest a medicine woman. Finally, they tell him to pray.
John Grady rides to Torreon and phones Alejandra in Mexico City. Finally, she agrees to meet him in Zacatecas on her way to the hacienda. She will travel by train. He stables the grullo and catches a train and arrives in Zacatecas in the late afternoon. He gets a room in the Reina Cristina Hotel and walks around the old city. Alejandra’s train is late and he almost doesn’t recognize her in a blue dress and hat. She tells him he is thin. They walk and have dinner in a public place where the men stare at her. He tells her everything. Alejandra does not understand John Grady, or men in general, and says, “What are men?” Alejandra tells him that she told her father of their affair. “How could you tell him?” John Grady responds. Alejandra cries. She believes that her father did not kill John Grady in the mountains when the greyhounds came into the camp because he was afraid Alejandra would commit suicide if he did.
In the hotel room, John Grady asks Alejandra to go away with him. In the morning, she tells him she had a dream some time ago in which she saw him dead and she made a promise for his life. She takes him to the plaza where her grandfather died in 1914, serving under one of the Maderos. They go to the hotel room and make love, and she tells him she cannot go with him. He takes her to the train, where they part for the last time. He gets drunk, and in the morning he does not know where he is. He hitchhikes back to Torreon. He buys shells for his pistol and rides into the countryside. That night, he camps without a fire and listens to his horse grazing. He thinks about the pain of the world. Five days later, John Grady comes to a crossroads and decides to go the other way to La Encantada. “I aint leavin my horse down here.”
He captures the captain who shot Blevins, and they ride to the hacienda where the horses are. After some fighting and the passive help of a charro, he does retrieve his horses, but eventually he must leave the grullo behind, because it is not strong enough for the trip. But he is able to travel with Redbo, Junior, and Blevins’ big bay. John Grady has rigged a pistol to shoot after he and the horses are farther away, and it does, leading their followers off the trail. He keeps the captain as a hostage and doctors himself by putting a fire-heated pistol into his wounds to cauterize them. The captain says he can go no father, but John Grady helps him by pulling his shoulder back into place. He awakens to three men of the country standing over him. They take the keys and the captain, but they give John Grady a blanket. He never sees them again. He rides all day, headed north, killing a small doe for food.
John Grady crosses the river west of Langtry, undressed with his boots stowed, as he had entered Mexico in “that long ago,” as McCarthy notes. In Texas, naked, he sits on his horse and looks at the pale landscape and knows his father is dead in that country. He weeps. John Grady knows this only by intuition, and he is right. In the town of Langtry, he finds out it is Thanksgiving Day. He rides the border country for days, trying to find the owner of the big bay. Then, just before Christmas, three men try to go to court to get the horse. He tells his story to the judge, who thinks kindly of John Grady and sends him on his way. After hearing a reverend named Jimmy Blevins on the radio, he goes to Del Rio to meet the man. The preacher and his wife feed John Grady and tell him the horse is not theirs. They have no memory of anyone fitting Blevins’ description. The minister tells him how he came to be a radio personality. John Grady never finds the owner of the horse, and, finally, the first week of March, he is back in San Angelo.
He goes to Rawlins’ house and whistles to get Rawlins’ attention. John Grady returns Rawlins’ horse, Junior, to his friend. When Rawlins asks John Grady what he’s going to do next, John Grady says he’s going to head out. Rawlins points out that it’s still “good country,” and John Grady says, “Yeah. I know it is. But it aint my country.” Before John Grady rides away, he goes to the funeral of Abuela. He stands across the road, and, after all the mourners leave, he walks the cemetery where he knows most of the Spanish names. He rides west, leading his second horse. Some camped Indians watch him, without any reaction.
