So Far, So Good       kip williams

The cowboys on the Hat Six are a good bunch. Most of them have ridden together for a while and know how to get things done, Not a tinhorn among them. Each is able to sit a horse, quick with a loop, and ready to use a sixgun if it came down to it. A solid crew. The owner, Frenchy Pinoicit, has so much faith in them he is able to entrust the day-to-day business of the spread to their care while his own mind is occupied with more exciting and interesting business prospects. He's ridden the San Juan Mountains alone for the past couple weeks searching for something he didn't talk about much . This one is a little weird even by Frenchy's standards. He said he was prospecting bentonite but in fact he is searching for an eleven inch man.

"A little feller, about yay high," Frenchy said to his crew boss, Sheldon, leveling his palm off at the top of his Coca-Cola. Then he proceeded to tell of two miners who blasted a hole and found him sitting crosslegged in the back of a carved out cavern, eyeing them carefully. It had frightened the two so badly they'd run right back out into the open, then been unwilling to bed down where the little rascal might come out and find them sleeping.

If Frenchy had followed the miners just a few more steps, he'd see them pulled into the Casper Wyoming branch of the Theosophical Society,to be placed in comfortable settees, warmed with English teas and filled with sweet scones. The Casper group had taken on an entirely new air of excitement, with the recent arrival of an  odd collection of physicians, physicists, and metaphysicians racing to find a place to continue their research beyond the prying eyes and long arms of the recently formed FDA. 

Within hours, these Borderland Scientists, as they term themselves, are loading cabinets of complex electronic gadgets designed by their flights of scientific fancy and constructed of wire, rheostats, lights, gauges, paddles and switches. Leaving their hidden compound, the Borderland Research Center, nestled in a small valley two miles west of the Hat Six Ranch, they turn southwest, guided by their machines.

The race for the Little Man is on.