IMPROBABLE
Fortunes
a genuine archer book
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Archer/Rare Bird
601 West 26th Street · Suite 325 · New York · NY 10001
archerlit.com
Copyright © 2016 by Jeffrey Price
Set in Minion
ePub ISBN: 978-1-941729-12-0
Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data
Names: Price, Jeffrey.
Title: Improbable fortunes: a novel / Jeffrey Price.
Description: First Hardcover edition | Los Angeles [California] ; New York [New York] : Archer/Rare Bird Books, 2016.
Identifiers: ISBN 978-1-941729-08-3.
Subjects: LCSH: Cowboys—Fiction | Mining—Fiction | Colorado—Fiction | BISAC: LITERARY/Fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3616.R5261 2016 | DDC 813.6—dc23.
For Jennie
Contents
Adopted by the Dominguez Family
Learning the Ropes at the Boyles’
Ground Zero: The Puster Auction
Eighteen Licks and One for Good Luck
PROLOGUE
By morning, several theories would circulate Vanadium as to why their town had been destroyed. Vanadium’s First Church of Thessalonians would put forth the notion that the Almighty had finally gotten around to clearing off His cluttered desk only to discover a stack of neglected outrages, perpetrated in these environs, so great as to demand His immediate retribution. Some of the standouts were the Spanish Conquistadors’ introduction of Vanadium’s first native inhabitants to slavery, small pox, and syphilis; the Mormons’ massacre of the Utes; the range wars of the 1870s; the many murders over water, women, and the receipt for the uranium mined—not two miles from Vanadium’s Main Street, that was expedited to Japan via the Enola Gay. The pagans in town believed their misfortune was caused by the Curse of the Utes—a hex put upon this land by shamans and trotted out whenever anything went wrong. But in the cold light of day, when everyone had settled down, they would come to the consensus that what had befallen them was simply because Marvin Mallomar, one of the richest men in the United States, had moved there from New York City and formed an unlikely friendship
