The Color had been proven in the swirling depths of his pan. The outlaw tilted and swiveled the implement, holding it just beneath the creek's surface and employing the mellow current to sift through the sediment. He sat upon a stone outcropping with his bare feet planted in the muddy bottom and his trousers rolled up to mid-calf. The worthless silt filtered past and resumed its downstream course.

“Eureka,” he quietly thanked the creek. He pinched the nugget and held it before his eyes to better appraise its worth, rubbing away what sludge persisted, obscuring the Color. He saw its gold-glinting, but his cuticles were stained not only by their customary grime but also by blood, as if he had sliced himself on some spur of the pan but felt no pain on account of the creek's numbing gush.

“It's a fair trade, Duane,” he said to himself and inspected his cold digits for the cut. “Blood-for-Color.”

There was no wound apparent upon him, though – and it was tough to muster even a solitary fuck for a flesh-wound since he was holding in his possession a five-dollar nugget. This was not a fortune by any means, but it would afford him some whiskey and twat and most importantly the rumor was confirmed: the sod-busting Baltimoreans' unworked claim did for fact house gold.

October past he had become acquainted with the land-owner, Angus – a fat and gray old farmer who’d come into Red Junction proper looking for an honest laborer. Instead, Angus had happened upon Duane, but he was at least an affordable hand. Over the course of two weeks Duane had erected the very-same barbed-wire perimeter inside which he was at-present trespassing. He spent some honest sweat, and might even have continued thus if it hadn't been for the farmer's daughter:

Isolated, sequestered from pricks as she was by her father's want for solitude, the farmer's daughter was an effortless conquest. The recollection of her drew a vision in Duane's mind: her entirely disheveled from their impromptu intercoursing, flat on her back with her frock bunched at her waist and her hair tangled in the grass. She had laid there with her cheeks flushed and prattled on without pause or any foreseeable end and Duane had rolled and lit a cigarette:

“Are you after the Color?” she had asked him, and she gestured for his smoke. “You ain't the only one. Men from Red Junction inquired to purchase father's claim not two weeks ago – emissaries of the Westman Mining Company. Daddy says we won't sell, though. You've never seen a man so upset to learn his claim is a rich one.”

It was then that Duane's interest had been piqued:

“Westman's geologists said as much?”

“They did and do – by words and by letters,” she said. “But Daddy is not a prospector and we did not come here on dreams of Color.”

Duane smirked at the memory and stuffed the still-damp nugget in the pocket of his trousers. Satisfied the pan was spent, he poured the afterbirth in the dirt and wiped his palms upon his shirt.

Tip-toeing bare-foot, he returned to his station, setting the empty pan upon a stone jutting at the creek's edge and taking up his short-handled spade to extricate more gravel from the bed. Upstream, invisible behind the crowding pines, a short waterfall roiled at its termination and he pictured its turbulence flecked with Color. Where he sat and the water narrowed, Mother Nature had whiled away eons demolishing and reconstructing the rocks, and that was where he dug – deeply enough to exhume the soil deposited just above the bedrock. He scooped it into the pan and set aside the spade before dunking his feet in the stream once more and hunkering to inspect the freshly unearthed contents. Holding his breath, he listened intently for a plink or a growl – the sounds of Color dancing in a pan.

Something unseen plunged into the creek upstream and interrupted the whole exercise.

With the pan still dipped just an inch below the surface he stuck motionless, certain that Angus had ambushed him and already held him at gun-point. Duane's mind scrambled for an excuse which could explain his trespass but he felt the conniving parts of him eroded and washed downstream like so much silt. He pictured Angus lurking in the pine-forest behind him with the shotgun lowered, threatening to disintegrate his skull.

“Please do not shoot!” he pleaded without turning around. “I am not armed.”

But there was no answer, and an alternative explanation for the sound presented itself suddenly: perhaps the farmer's daughter had opted for an early-morning dip in the pond at the waterfall's foot. He imagined Beth's gown draped over a branch, her pale thighs scissoring to keep her treading water – and warmth spread through his belly despite the chill wrought by the creek upon his lowest extremities: prurience overwhelming the elements. Duane kept his hands held high and turned his head, but there was nothing except the shadows crossing the creek and the aspen leaves flickering in the breeze. He twisted at his trunk to examine the forest further, but even as he scoured the route of the brook the sound repeated from beyond the reach of his vision.

“That you, lass?” he braved to call upstream. “Do not be shy.”

When there was no answer, he set the pan aside and knelt and tugged his boots on. He seethed a moment and cursed the farmer's daughter – he intended to mete discipline upon her ass-cheeks by means of his hand when he found her – and it was only the prospect of that spanking which kept panic at bay.

“Alright girly,” he began in his most romantically firm voice. “Enough games: be ye ready or not – I am coming.”

As he sneaked along the creek he fingered his knife in its sheath. Ahead, beyond the crush of forest, he heard the noise once more: the tell-tale splash-and-draw of water displaced, perhaps the smack of a nude swimmer's stroke – or, he speculated, a shotgun-wielding farmer stomping rough-shod, hell-bent on his murder.

“This coy act does not amuse me...” He mustered his globes and jerked his belt's buckle up and down. “You’re apt to suffer numerous lashes for this mischief!”

Through the trees he saw the sun reflected in the pool at the fall's foot. Fixating upon it, he hustled ahead. The limbs overhead rustled and stole his attention. He ceased his advance, clutched his dagger and focused on the commotion – and though she was obscured almost entirely by trembling cottonwood leaves, Duane saw her lithe calf and the delicate toes of her foot dangling from a bough which stretched straight across the brook.

It was Beth, kicking playfully at the air above the creek. He grinned – this was sweeter dreaming than he even reckoned himself capable – and relented his grip on the knife, opting instead to work at his belt's clasp with both hands as he closed the space between them.

“It is impolite for a lady to partake of such subterfuge,” he chided and came to stand below her perch, angling his face upward to finally learn the full extent of her undress.

His tongue slid lasciviously across his lips – but, the moment after, poured horrors upon him. Luke-warm syrup slopped from the tree-top and swallowed him whole. He reckoned a pail of hog-mash had been emptied onto his face and throat and breast; then the entirety of the world was warped and he viewed it through a blood-hued lens. In the branches above him Beth's leg kicked out again. At last, he saw that her movements were not playful, nor even of her own willing – rather, her throes were the result of a profanely muscular cougar perched in the boughs, dragging her haltingly up the tree by means of its thick, curved claws. The talons pierced her at the armpits. The run-off of her decimation was that sludge coating him – and Duane realized it had been fleshy hunks of Beth which had drawn him to this juncture with their plopping taunts. She was without an arm and her gown was shreds and her face had been et away till it were mostly skull and other fleshy portions were even spread on the far bank—

He felt the want to flee something fierce but Duane's boots would not obey. He heard high-pitched whining and assumed it was the dead girl he had meant to poke but then realized it was his own breath squeezing out tinnily. The cougar tilted its head and grinned at him – or was that another trick of the blood-lens? – and retracting its claws from the carcass it let her tumble out of the cottonwood. She plummeted into the water and Duane saw her detached-arm bobbing.

It got his boots moving. He turned to run fast as he could but, upon his pivot, instead collided belly-to-belly with the fat old farmer he had forgotten to fear.

“I found her this way!” Duane screamed, but Angus seemed unmoved – and further Duane saw that the fat old man's eyes suggested something demented had taken him, each operating of their own accord and seemingly without aim. He stepped back and saw the farmer's shirt was entirely unbuttoned; his chest was painted bright red and the gore pooled upon the shelf of his domed gut. His face wore a mask of blood from snout-to-chin and his jaw worked at chewing on nothing but the air.

“Angus?” he asked. The fat old man said nothing but took one swift stride. His thick fingers clasped Duane's biceps and his strength was embarrassing – emasculating and withering – and Duane hollered: “No! No!”

Then there came the crush. The farmer's gut was stone-hard and slick and Duane was baked by his fever in the clench of their embrace. He saw Dead Beth caught in the creek's stirring, and then her father's mouth kissed him upon the cheek and the pressure was all he perceived as Angus's teeth cleaved through the meat. The fanged-vice clamped upon Duane's jaw-bone – just beneath his ear where the mandible attached to the skull – and his perceptions were all wrought by bone-on-bone grinding – and then Angus jerked away and thrashed the way a wolf wrenches apart its portion of the kill. He heard his own screaming – but mostly it were the rapid-popping catastrophe of a ship being splintered on jagged rocks. Then the breeze was cool on his tongue and inner-cheek and teeth – and that cracking sound was not a shipwreck but the fracturing and extrication of his own jaw. No further screams could be formed for his face was come-apart. How swiftly sweet dreams had turned rancid – and that was the calm moment that becomes all things alive when they inevitably meet Death.

The cougar slinked from the cottonwood – a molasses-made cat. It sat on its haunches across the creek and pondered the pair's tussling. The beast licked the pad of its foot and yawned before stretching itself ludicrously from clawed-paws to the twitching tip of its tail in a contented display only a feline could fully accomplish. Then the cougar loped away, meandering downstream.