Mesa Trail ch.11
Draft 3

Kitie knew the stories of her great grandfather's mining adventures alright. There seems to be a storyteller in any family, the one who wants to listen, maybe secretly, to the elders as they chat around the kitchen table at night, or who likes to look through the old handwritten letters sent from sister to sister or brother to brother from ages past.  For Kitie it was the stories of great grandfather that had filled her dreams at night.  She often got the one that seemed to last forever, of the high cliff at a mountain ridge.  She could see out over the cliff onto nothing but a city made of gold.  Not a single wooden roof or wall, no schools, no glass, just golden counters, all connected, for as long as the eye could see.  A feeling stirred inside her dream self, inside the stomach, if felt like the feeling you get you fall as she contemplated flying over that city of gold.  Most dreams, she always thought later, allowed you to do that, just start flying or falling and you would always wake up before it all happened.  But in her dream, she was never allowed to move.  She was stuck in place, there at the edge overlooking.  She thought she could even feel sometimes the heat of the golden city and lifted up her hands as if to a fire. She could feel it on her face. There were no people, just birds of some sort flying around in the sky around her.  All this wouldn't be so bad if she didn't have the dream all the time.  She just knew it came from the story of her grandfather's 'boxes' as her family called them.  He was an early prospector, had come all the west from Roxbury in Boston where he was the owner of the Three Cranes Bar.  Working in a port city like that, at a bar, he heard every wild adventure known to mankind of that time.  Merchants arriving from Europe told of their tough luck on the seas, they told of stories of desperation, and they, as all seamen do, told their stories of the day that would come when they put the life of the sea behind them, settle down, in a city just like this one, and then make their way across the continent to find gold!