Captain Call sat in the dark four hours before sunrise and studied the problem in front of him. Two destitute travelers, a herd of recently stolen horses, and a plan that was slipping away. His original goal had been simple, to return with a hundred Mexican horses. It was a good plan, carefully made, like most of his plans.

“Though he’d always been a careful planner, life on the frontier had long ago convinced him of the fragility of plans,” Larry McMurtry writes in Lonesome Dove, “and the truth was, most plans did fail, to one degree or another, for one reason or another. He had survived as a ranger because he was quick to respond to what he had actually found, not because his planning was infallible.”

That’s life.