In late September 1879, Presley, a young poet, leaves the Los Muertos ranch on a bicycle in search of inspiration for an epic poem of the West that he hopes to compose: “some vast, tremendous theme, heroic, terrible, to be unrolled in all the thundering progression of hexameters” (9). He meets Hooven, a Los Muertos tenant farmer who expresses concern at circulating rumors: Magnus Derrick, the owner of Los Muertos, will use new harvesting technologies to work the land, rendering his tenants obsolete. Presley, however, disdains “uncouth brutes of farmhands and petty ranchers” (5), and he struggles to share his concern.

Presley speaks with Harran, Magnus’s youngest son, and tells him about Hooven’s concerns. However, Harran, unsettled that his father was unable to secure a better shipping rate for their wheat, doesn’t listen. Presley is indifferent to both issues. Facing the banalities of life, he reflects that he “searched for the True Romance, and, in the end, found grain rates and unjust freight tariffs” (13).

Presley proceeds to the small Spanish Mexican town of Guadalajara, where he encounters Dyke, an engineer who was laid off by the Railroad for refusing to take a pay cut.