From The Shadows of Mount Pisgah — R. William Rogers

With the gold now showing up just about anywhere a fella takes a notion to stomp the business end of a shovel into a pile of dirt, comes an influx of hopeful prospectors and their families.

The new arrivals are followed closely by untold numbers of opportunistic types who will stop at nothing to take what they want from the hard-working folks and their Pastor, Chad Blackman.

The town of Fremont expands to overflowing and Cripple Creek Township becomes a reality, along with such other mining towns as: Victor, Gillette, Grassy, Midway, Stratton, Ironclad, and a whole passel of others. Myers Avenue quickly overran with saloons, dancehalls, brothels, one-girl cribs, and darned near any other unsavory type of enterprise that encourages a dishonest man or woman to prey on the miners who dream of striking it rich.

One gent who is of a mind to do just that is the less-than-illustrious, Reverend Alexander Stapleton. The Reverend, who it turns out is not a Reverend at all, is in actuality a con man of the most heartless sort. He is, in fact, heartless to the point of not only being a wife-beater, but a cold-blooded murderer as well.

After doing away with his common-law wife, Selma, in Pastor Chad Blackman's home, Stapleton disappears from the valley. Despite a dogged effort on Chad's part, he loses track of the killer but refuses to let the memory of what the man did, fade from his memory.

As the years pass, and the town of Cripple Creek sinks ever farther into the pit of hell-fire and damnation, the Lord finally decides to take a hand in it. In the space of only four ill-fated days, the town twice catches fire and is purged...much in the same fashion that He used to take care of Sodom and Gomorrah.