"It’s so ridiculous!" Amelia muttered in Dutch to Saskia. The two of them were at a table in the Beer Car’s saloon with Rufus and Eshma, who had come over and befriended them. Amelia was sitting with arms folded, getting a load of the gate, like a student puzzling over a math problem. She caught Rufus looking at her and switched to English. "These Texas ranch gates! We have seen a number of these now. So huge and grand. But they don’t connect to anything." She waved her hand off to the side. Each of the two massive stone gateposts was buttressed by a wing of stone wall, maybe two meters high and extending for a few meters away from the gate. There it gave way to chain-link fence, newly installed, which ran off into the desert for no more than thirty meters before giving way to standard-issue ranch fencing: strands of taut barbed wire that rose no higher than an average person’s midsection.