The Wonderful Country »

"Tom Lea's The Wonderful Country opens as mejicano pistolero Martin Bredi is returning to El Puerto [El Paso] after a fourteen-year absence. Bredi carries a gun for the Chihuahuan war lord Cipriano Castro and is on Castro's business in Texas. Bredi fears he will be arrested for murder once he is back across the Rio Grande. Fourteen years earlier - shortly after the end of the Civil War - when he was the boy Martin Brady, he killed the man who murdered his father and fled to Mexico where he became Martin Bredi." "Back in Texas, other misfortunes occur to Brady. First he breaks a leg; then he falls in love with a married woman while recuperating; and, finally, to right another wrong, he kills a man." When Brady/Bredi returns to Mexico, the Castros distrust him as an American, and Martin is in the intolerable position of being not a man of two countries but a man without a country.