Alferez Antonio Sonoro was born with gold in his eyes. The gold was sharp and it stung him so that he blinked uncontrollably and always carried a vial of salted water in his pocket. Of the four Sonoro brothers he was the only one thus signified, and his parents regarded it a blessing, incontestable proof of divine favor. Though he was the youngest, the servants carved his portion of meat first, even before his father’s. His mother often knelt before him at night, delivering her prayers directly to her child, rather than to God.

The Sonoros lived in Dorado, a mining town established by their silk-clad forebears in the arid brushland fronting what the Texans called the Rio Grande, but which the Mexicans gave the more descriptive name Río Bravo del Norte. A flock of clay-colored buildings studded with wooden vigas and decorated with dahlias drowsing in white pots, Dorado sat quiet and erect across the water from the wilds of the province of Texas, a four-day journey upstream from where the river spooled emerald into the briny Gulf. Dorado, meaning “golden,” was both a wish and a command—the earth there was split apart by the Sonoros and her bounty revealed. And they took lustily.

The pain in his eyes made Alferez Antonio unsympathetic. If I can stand it, he thought, anyone can withstand anything. And most people believed he’d been born with gold in his loins as well for he lusted after more, more than he could spend, more than he could hold, more than could ever be dragged by the cartful from the belly of the earth.

When Alferez Antonio stood in the sunlight, the gold gleamed white and it was impossible for anyone to address him without averting their own gaze. Even his father, abandoning all pretense that he was master of his child, took to doffing his hat and holding it at his chest and looking at the ground one day when his teenage son stood at the entrance to the mother lode and demanded to know why only grown men worked in the mine.