Meet Horace Hopper, a twenty-one-year-old farm hand in Tonopah, Nevada, who works for Mr Reece and his wife, the nearest thing he's had to family in years. But Horace, half-white half-Paiute Indian, dreams of bigger things. Leaving behind the farm and its fragile stability, he heads South to re-invent himself as the Mexican boxer Hector Hidalgo.