The Phantom Buck

By Jerald T. Oldroyd

The Old Timer lives in an old prospectors cabin that he rebuilt. The cabin is close to a beautiful waterfall. He came to this area because of roomers of gold being panned below the falls. He discovers a unique happening of nature, a white mule deer fawn.

His life becomes more meaningful as he follows the life of this beautiful deer, and continues to look for the mother lode and where the gold is coming from.

The people of Lode, think he is a strange person and want nothing to do with him, and he wants nothing to do with them.

After his death, the people find out what kind of a person he really was.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jan 22, 2013
• ISBN: 9781475965148

Jerald T. Oldroyd

Jerald Oldroyd, currently a retired elementary school teacher of 35 years lives in a little town surrounded by majestic mountains in Southern Utah, with a population of about 450 people. Being a school teacher for all of those years, he knows what kind of books children would enjoy reading. He is a wildlife photographer, who for years has studied the habits of animals. His love for children and wildlife motivated him to write this book. His wife MayDene and their four children also live in Utah.

Book preview

THE

PHANTOM

BUCK

JERALD T. OLDROYD

iUniverse, Inc.

Bloomington

The Phantom Buck

Copyright © 2013 by Jerald T. Oldroyd.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

ISBN: 978-1-4759-6513-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-6514-8 (ebk)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012922731

iUniverse rev. date: 01/04/2013

CONTENTS

Chapter 1    The Old Timer And His Cabin

Chapter 2    The Miracle

Chapter 3    The Phantom Gets His Name

Chapter 4    The Phantom’s Secret Is Revealed

Chapter 5    The Phantom Becomes A Legend

Chapter 6    The Legend Will Live On

Chapter 7    Watched And Followed

Chapter 8    Cabin Fever

Chapter 9    The Magnificent Elk

Chapter 10  The Old Timer’s Last Days

Chapter 11  The Funeral

This book is dedicated to my grandchildren

who love to listen to stories.

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CHAPTER 1

THE OLD TIMER AND HIS CABIN

In an old one room log cabin nestled back in the pine and quakie trees at the north edge of a beautiful mountain meadow lived the Old Timer. He was a man of seventy years. Most of those years had been filled with hard work. His hands were rough and worn like old leather. He had long, well-kept gray hair and beard. His clothes were patched, but clean. His felt hat was crooked and soaked from many days of sweat. His kind, tired eyes were steel gray mixed with a little blue. His face, and his hands, were like a piece of dry leather that needed a good oiling to make them look and feel soft. He walked with a slight limp. He had lived in the cabin for seven years. The people who knew him called him The Old Timer. They said he was very polite and kind, but never wanted to get too friendly or too social. He just wanted to be left alone, to live his life out the way he wanted. Some thought him to be a little different and didn’t want anything to do with him. No one knew much about him.

Rumors held he’d had a wife and two children who were killed in a car accident, the same accident that gave him his life-long limp. He had no family members living. Soon after the accident, he retired from his job as a sledge hammer man in a gypsum quarry where he made little rocks out of big ones.

Besides the intriguing isolation, he was motivated to move to the mountain because of gold found in the area by prospectors and mountain men who explored here years before any other white man. These prospectors came to get rich by searching and panning for gold. They were drawn by gold fever which was fed by the rumors that a few, pea-sized nuggets had been found.

Some of the prospectors did find a few flakes of gold glinting in their pans once in a while.

Those who had panned the mountain stream, finding gold in their pans, knew that somewhere close by there must be a mother lode where these small flakes originated. They pictured the gold coming from one of the many ravines and gullies that emptied into the mountain stream as melting snow and heavy rains flowed down from the high mountains.

The higher gullies and ravines had been walked and dug in many places but the mother lode remained hidden. The flakes of gold were panned from the creek below the falls. Where was the gold coming from? Where was the mother lode? Each prospector had dreams of being the one to unlock the secret, finding the mother lode.

The early army of prospectors who flooded over the area gave names to meadows, creeks and mountains so they could tell others where they had been. Many of these names were handed down and are still in use today.

The icy, crystal mountain stream was named Prospector Creek. The forty