All the Pretty Horses recap

After his family's Texas ranch is sold, sixteen-year-old John Grady Cole rides into Mexico with his friend Lacey Rawlins. A reckless younger runaway, Jimmy Blevins, briefly joins them and leaves behind trouble tied to a stolen horse and pistol. John Grady and Rawlins find work on Don Héctor Rocha's hacienda, where John Grady proves a gifted horseman and begins a forbidden affair with Don Héctor's daughter Alejandra. The Americans are arrested, Blevins is executed, and John Grady and Rawlins survive a brutal prison before Alejandra's great-aunt buys their release in exchange for Alejandra's promise to end the relationship. After a final meeting, Alejandra keeps that promise. John Grady recovers the horses at gunpoint and returns to Texas, but his father has died and the ranch is gone. Unable to restore the life he imagined, he rides west carrying both his devotion to horses and the moral burden of the violence he survived.

In 1949, sixteen-year-old John Grady Cole learns that the West Texas ranch where he grew up will be sold after his grandfather's death. His estranged mother wants a different life, and neither his father nor the courts can preserve John Grady's claim to the place. He and his friend Lacey Rawlins ride south into Mexico. On the way they are joined by a younger boy calling himself Jimmy Blevins, who possesses a valuable horse and a large pistol that John Grady suspects are stolen. During a thunderstorm Blevins panics, loses his clothes, horse, and weapon, and draws the others into recovering the horse from a settlement. Pursued after the theft, the three separate, with Blevins riding away alone. John Grady and Rawlins continue across northern Mexico and seek work, still uncertain what consequences Blevins has left behind them.

John Grady and Rawlins are hired at Don Héctor Rocha's large hacienda. Their skill at breaking a group of young horses earns notice, and John Grady's knowledge of breeding leads Don Héctor to give him greater responsibility with a prized stallion. John Grady meets the owner's daughter Alejandra and falls in love with her. Despite warnings from Alejandra's formidable great-aunt Alfonsa, the two begin a secret sexual relationship. Alfonsa describes how class, family history, and the aftermath of revolution shaped her distrust of romantic hopes and makes clear that Alejandra will bear consequences John Grady may underestimate. Don Héctor learns of the affair. Mexican officers arrive, arrest John Grady and Rawlins, and take them away from the hacienda. Their earlier association with Blevins, combined with the family's anger over Alejandra, has made their position perilous.

The police reunite John Grady and Rawlins with Blevins, who had returned for his stolen pistol, killed a man, and been captured. While transporting the prisoners, the captain takes Blevins aside and executes him. John Grady and Rawlins are sent to the prison at Saltillo, where every day requires vigilance and violence. Rawlins is badly wounded in an attack and removed for treatment. John Grady refuses to pay the influential prisoner Emilio Pérez for protection. An assassin then attacks him in the dining hall; John Grady is seriously wounded but kills the man and survives. Without explanation, he and Rawlins are eventually released. They learn that Alfonsa paid for their freedom after extracting a promise from Alejandra. Rawlins decides to return to Texas. John Grady remains in Mexico to learn whether Alejandra will choose a future with him despite her family.

John Grady meets Alejandra in Zacatecas and asks her to leave with him. She still loves him but refuses to break the promise she made to Alfonsa in exchange for his release, and they part. He then returns to the town where the police hold the horses belonging to him, Rawlins, and Blevins. At gunpoint he takes the captain prisoner and recovers all three animals. Pursued and wounded, he eventually releases the captain into the custody of local men and crosses back into Texas. Rawlins accepts his own horse but will not continue traveling, and John Grady learns that his father has died. A court recognizes John Grady's ownership of Blevins's horse, though he cannot find its original owner. He returns the stolen pistol and attends the funeral of Abuela, the longtime family servant. With the ranch sold and the people who anchored his former life gone, John Grady rides west with the horses into an uncertain future.

John Grady returns to Texas with his own horse, Rawlins's horse, and the horse Blevins had stolen. Rawlins is glad to see him but declines to travel farther, and John Grady finds that his father has died. He seeks legal recognition of his ownership of the disputed horse and tells a judge the full story of the killing in prison and his actions in Mexico. Although the judge rules in his favor and later reassures him that his remorse is evidence of conscience, John Grady remains troubled by the violence and by his inability to return the horse to its unknown owner. He also returns the captain's pistol to the man from whom Blevins stole it. With the family ranch gone, Alejandra lost to him, and no stable home left in Texas, John Grady attends the funeral of the family's longtime servant Abuela. He then rides west with the recovered horses, crossing a landscape in which his ideal of the old horseman's world is receding.