Mesa Trail ch. 30
Draft 2

What a little taste of gold will do to most any man.  An entire nation making a mass movement from east to west.  Give up your home, hearth, your mule.  Tough it out over vast plains, fight off native peoples so you can clamber up into those no name hills that might have some of it laced in among the great rocks.  How quickly Bunkledon became a backwoods explorer.  He had found a peculiar creek along Crown Rock Trail. Even he realized that there would be hundreds of little creeks lined up and down these mountain sides.  All that rain and moisture has to go down hill.  He understood that.  Some of them, though, were nothing more than cuts through the fern, maybe a brief cascade over the roots of some overturned mammoth oak.  He stirred up the courage to follow one in particular that looked a lot more rocky, like it had been there for a long time, and had carved out and scoured curves and scooped in and out of side walls forever and ever.  He might have had a pan with him, why not?  He had a map in hand with x's marking spots and places to go.  Somewhere up there at the top was a mother lode. It was time to find out for himself.  He crouched down over a very shallow patch of the creek that was sweeping over a rock bed.  The sun had not yet spilled over the other side of the Flatirons so he could see the clarity of the water.  How tempting to take a sip.

As he dipped his little pan down into the chopped up bits and particles of the sand in between the larger rocks, he realized he wasn't thinking a smidge about the woods around him. He might as well be directly down on Pearl Street below, right outside his office, for all cared.  He pictured his own little outfit right here, nobody else would ever know, and would come up here on week nights, weekends and slowly, carefully fill up his jars with gold. He pictured how he would walk directly up to his boss, Ms. Lana Shore, -- oh how he didn't like her ways -- and simply stoop over and show her his new rocks, then say good bye "forever!" Folks, he hadn't even found a morsel of gold yet! He'd given up everything he owned to make this thing work, and one day, one day, as sure as the sun rises in the west and sets in the east...or was it rise in the east and set in the west...well, whichever it was, as sure as that happened, he would someday find that secret Flatiron mother lode that the native legends talked about.  So he did dip that pan into the sandy bottom, and he slooshed that pile around until the excess water had spilled over the side and if he didn't find, right down there at the bottom of the regular rock, little specks that shone out from all the rest like the yellow sun itself! Something stirred in his belly, a rising up of the blood and it went right to his eyes and they seemed to burn with visions.  He looked up at the passage of the creek as far as he could see it.  It came off a wide sheet of flat bedrock above and a slight falls.  Churning up the gold just for him, he thought, and made his way along the banks.  Biggalow, unknown to any other creature in the area, had been posing as a big black boulder, still as a rock itself, watching to see if this lone little creature was going to be silly enough to try to climb these loose wet rocks.