I found this on a backup disc from last year. I have only the faintest memory of writing it. Posted with the bare minimum of proofreading.

Carver’s Glen was not what you’d call a decent town. In fact, calling it a town would be charitable. Amounting to little more than a handful of shacks clustered around a wind-scarred general store, it was not the sort of place where anyone could live for long. Prospectors on their way into the Rockies would rest there for a few days, saving their energy for the push across the jagged range that would lead them to fresh wilderness, unpanned rivers and a fortune in gold. Prospectors on their way back east would stop by for slightly longer. Some held fast to denial, telling all who would listen (there was not much choice but to listen, when there was only one saloon) of their inevitable success.

The motherlode was just over the next ridge, they’d say. They could smell the gold. It was a skill that ran in the family, you see. My grandfather’s father could smell a vein of gold at thirty yards. The scent carries, but only some can smell it. I know it’s out there, I’m sure. I just had to come back and stock up, you see. Gonna be a lot of gold to carry out of that river, I tell you.

Inevitably, the optimists would charge headlong back into the mountains, perhaps returning once or twice more before giving up, or messengers on horseback would arrive with draft notices from back east, or they’d disappear along with two borrowed mules. Killed by catamounts, folk would say. Or by those mountain savages, or the fanged, frigid wind. None would say what they all knew: that they’d just as soon kill each other if there were none to hear the shot.

The owner of the Carver’s Glen general store, who also rented out the flimsy shacks and tended the bar in the saloon, had been a prospector himself once. Shrewd as he was, he soon learned there was more money to be made from men in search of gold than there was in any of Colorado’s high rivers. He’d seen all kinds. The men who’d been panning for decades, living off small findings in the Mississippi Basin, who longed for fresh territory. They knew the land and loved it, and the gold mattered less when they could hunt and live comfortably with nothing. The twitchy youngsters who sought fortune and a life of luxury, too feckless or weak-willed to work for their living. Those rarely passed through Carver’s Glen but once. Once in a long while would come a dark man from the plains, leather breeches cinched at the waist with braided rawhide cord, dreamcatcher about his neck and the smoky shape of his totem spirit standing in his place when you looked at him out of the corner of your eye.

But in all the years he’d tended the place, the last vestige of god-fearing civilization before the ascent toward those haunted summits, nothing had prepared the barkeep for the man who stumbled from the forest in late evening, running from the darkness as the setting sun stretched the shadow of the Rockies over the glen. He burst from the trees, boots broken and feet bleeding, carrying a leather satchel and a bloody knife (though whose blood none could tell, or would), his breath coming in great whimpering gasps. The look on his face was neither fear nor despair nor ecstasy, but some combination of all and none of those things. His eyes were wide like a child’s, and he gazed at the boundless prairie to the east below the village as though he had never seen beauty in his life. Some expression tugged at the corner of his mouth - perhaps a smile, or a grimace of pain - when the last ember of the sun disappeared behind the mountains and he dropped dead in the village square.