- Jason McCord: Now look, Thorp... Barbed wire is the future of the beef business. You can accept that, or you can fight it and soak the range with blood and fill the cemeteries. But you'll still lose, Thorp. Because post holes can be dug faster than graves and no man in history has yet stopped new ideas and new ways, you remember that.
- Holland Thorp: Boy, they sure did pile you high. How far up do you go?
- Jason McCord: If you mean how tall am I, six foot six, Mr. Thorpe.
- Holland Thorp: Either you got the ranch in your blood or you ain't. I've got it. I listen to the land stirring like it had got a heart of its own, quail and the sweet briar, cattle coming down through the chaparral for the water, feel of the storm coming. These hills have been my wife and children for 37 years. I'll protect them like they was my own flesh. You got any ties like that.
- Jason McCord: No.
- Holland Thorp: Then get out.
- Holland Thorp: I'm gonna make an example of you, you and everybody else that thinks open range oughta have a crown of thorns.
- [In the American way, Jason is set upon by at least a dozen of Thorp's thugs, fair odds? Jason stumbles back to Beckwith's wrapped in barbed fencing wire]
- Jason McCord: Use it to build a calf pen, a fence around a poisoned waterhole, Protection for an orchard or a bean field, or a herd of blooded stock. But get used to it, Mr Thorp, because it's the future of the cattle business.
- Roy Beckwith: Misunderstanding, my hind foot. Them hay shovellers couldn't blow their noses except on your orders.
- Holland Thorp: You know you ought to get out and sweat a little. You're getting a little pock-gutted.
- Roy Beckwith: You oughta get fitted for a pair of glasses and you'd see the old ways won't do no more. The cattle business is changing and what's changing it is barbed fence wire.
- Jason McCord: There's two miles of fence to a ton of wire.
- Foreman Kilgore: Miles. Don't seem possible.
- Jason McCord: Well, it is.
- Foreman Kilgore: Suppose we pull off a spool and see.
- Holland Thorp: How's the survey coming?
- Howie: You oughta know. You've been watching us all afternoon from that bute.
- Holland Thorp: Yeah, I kinda got thirsty just watching you.
- Roy Beckwith: I've played poker with that old buzzard long enough to know that he'll fold if the stakes get too high.
- Holland Thorp: I figured you'd come about those lead calling cards that my foreman sent over your way.
- Jason McCord: You knew about that?
- Holland Thorp: I guess a man's entitled to one fool question.